certain dark things
by threecankeepasecret
Summary: AU from 2x10. Damon and Elijah are both too late; Elena is taken to Klaus just like she wanted, one month before the next full moon, and one month before he's going to kill her. It's a dangerous game she has to play, and Elena knows better than to think she could win it; all she can do is whatever it takes to maybe, just maybe, not lose.
1. easy is the descent into hell

_The strength and splendor of our purpose swings._

 _The lamps fade; and the stars. We are alone._

\- Rupert Brooke

 **PART I**

 _The doppelganger is alive, and ready to surrender_.

Elena says those words, and she means them, but her heart is hammering in her chest and she can't breathe the entire time she waits. Rose yells at her for being reckless and thoughtless and for manipulating her, but Elena just blocks her out, reminding herself of why she's doing this. This isn't about what Rose thinks. This is about Jeremy and Jenna, who Klaus will slaughter if she runs just like he slaughtered Katherine's family. This is about Stefan and Damon, who will get themselves killed trying to protect her if they wait for Klaus to come to them. This is about Caroline and Bonnie and Tyler and Matt. She can't explain it to Rose—how every time she closes her eyes she pictures their bodies ripped apart all around her, just like Katherine had described it—but she knows why she's doing this, and her conviction won't waver.

It seems like years go by before three vampires burst into the house, eyes hungry on her, and Elena has to remind herself that if Klaus needs her, they won't hurt her.

"We're here for the doppelganger," one of them says.

Elena swallows, and steps forward. "Thank you for coming."

The vampire smiles, predatory, and takes a step closer. "You really do look exactly like her," he said, and Elena pictures Katherine, trapped in the tomb, dirty and starving.

"I know," she says. "Do you know where to find Klaus?"

His grin widens. "Don't you worry about that."

She can't go through with this plan unless she's certain it's going to work. "I asked you a question," she says, voice level, eyes fixed on his.

His grin fades. "No one does, exactly," he says, "but I know how to reach him."

It's probably as good as she's going to get. She turns back to Rose. "Tell everyone I'm sorry," she says, and then nods to the vampire, and then they're gone.

The house they bring her to is big, old, and dusty, a lot like the one Rose and Trevor kept her in, and Elena wonders if that's a common thing for vampires who don't have daylight rings. The vampires are almost mad in their giddiness. They don't manhandle her; either they know she doesn't need to be dealt with by force, or they don't want to risk leaving any marks on her (or maybe that's her reaching, trying to make some sort of guess as to what Klaus is like—it doesn't matter, now, she'll find out soon enough.) They bring her to a big sitting room, with massive bookshelves and a couple of old couches. She doesn't know how long she'll be here for, and she doesn't want to sleep, so she grabs _Jane Eyre_ and tries to distract herself in vain. Hours trickle by; at one point, there's a strange little whispered fight in the corner, which ends with one of the vampires calling over to ask if she'd like a glass of water, and she accepts.

Somehow, she'd expected to be taken straight to Klaus, or for Klaus to show up immediately; but of course, what were the chances that the oldest vampire in the world would be a short drive away?

She's sure at least a day goes by, maybe more, and she's managed to get a little sleep, but she's still starving when the vampires perk up, like dogs hearing something in the distance, and it could technically be anything but she _knows_ it's Klaus. She puts down her book and takes a deep breath, forcing herself to steady her heartbeat. For a second she thinks about standing up, but there was no reason to stand for some stranger trying to kill her. The vampires disappear.

She hears his voice before she sees him, hears, "This is impossible," in an amused British accent, and feels cold all over; then, "if this is some sort of trick, I will string you up and skin you alive—" and then sure and steady footsteps, and she looks up to the door just to see him come to a stop.

She isn't really sure what she was expecting—someone with an old world look and air, even more refined than Elijah—but not this twenty-something man in a leather jacket, and yet something about him is more terrifying than Elena could have expected. He's shocked, it's clear on his face, and yet unlike Elijah he does not rush over to her at full vampire speed; he takes slow steps, his gaze appraising, and she meets his eyes in perfect silence. By the time he's in front of her, there's amusement on his face.

"You're quite certain that this isn't Katerina playing one of her games?" he says, and it takes her a moment to realize that despite his gaze on her he's speaking to one of the other vampires.

"She's a human," says the one who had seemed to be in charge, before, but now looks like a terrified child.

Klaus leans in close to her, close enough that she can feel his breath on her lips. "And why would a human doppelganger surrender herself with no trouble at all?"

"Katherine told me what—" _what you did_ , but she doesn't want to anger him—"what happened to her family."

"You know Katerina," he says, and it isn't a question. "My, my, aren't you full of surprises, little doppelganger." His face draws back just a tiny bit. "And what's your name?"

"Elena," she replies, and Klaus grins and stands up straight.

"Well, then, Elena," he says, and extends a hand. "Shall we?"

Every nerve in her body is screaming for her to run, but she places her hand in his and lets him pull her to his feet. His hand snakes around her waist and pulls her closer, and she feels his nose against the skin of her neck, inhaling, and then feels the edge of his fangs.

They puncture her flesh, and she gasps.

For a second she thinks she's going to die here and now, and her entire body goes rigid, but it only lasts a moment. He pulls away, grinning at her, and she can see that oldest vampire they'd warned her about, the terrible monster who could leave Katherine Pierce quaking in fear. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket.

"Sorry, love," he says. "I just had to make sure."

They both know that he didn't need to drink to make sure, but her entire plan at this moment revolves around her not making him angry, so she doesn't say anything.

"Well, we should be off, then, shouldn't we?" he asks, and she doesn't reply, just purses her lips and keeps her gaze steady. His arm encircles her waist again and they're traveling at vampire speed, and then—

"Klaus?"

He stops, and looks back at the vampires, boredom all over his face. "Yes?"

"It's just… we delivered her to you—"

"You did," he replies.

"Don't we—"

"You get to live another day," says Klaus, clearly relishing the words. "Most who meet me cannot say that. You should feel honored."

They disappear.

. . .

He lets go of her when they reach a black car. Elena doesn't know much of anything about cars, but she can tell this one is expensive, and she's so startled that she starts to say, "don't you—"

"Expecting limousine service, were you sweetheart?" He smiles over at her, not at all perturbed. "All in due time, love. For now, I want to talk to my doppelganger alone."

 _My doppelganger_. She shivers.

He opens her door for her, a mockery of a gentleman, and she swallows but keeps her head up and gets in. A second later, he enters the driver's seat and turns on the ignition.

"I must admit, love, I'm surprised by you," he says, his voice light and cheerful. "How exactly do you exist?"

"Katherine had a baby out of wedlock," she says.

"Did she, now?" asks Klaus, his tone darkly amused.

"It's why she was exiled from Bulgaria," Elena continues. "Why you met her in England."

"Someone knows her history," says Klaus, as they pull off of the overgrown lawn and onto the road. "How do you know so much?"

"Rose and Trevor kidnapped me not long ago," she says. "To give me to Elijah, to get a pardon."

Klaus looks over at her, a smile no longer on his face. "You've met my brother?" he asked.

Elena gapes. "Elijah's your brother?"

Klaus grins. "Not too well-informed, I see," he says. "Now, beg pardon, sweetheart, but if you were in my brother's possession, I fail to see how you aren't still."

"I know some vampires," she says, trying to give as little information as possible. "They came to rescue me."

"Not Katerina, surely," says Klaus. "She wouldn't put herself in Elijah's vicinity." He paused, and his silence was terrifying. "What vampires do you know?"

Elena doesn't answer.

"Come on, now, love, don't be like that. You haven't betrayed me, which means I won't need to slaughter everyone you love in vengeance." He laughs as though he doesn't know that's exactly what she's terrified of. "Besides, I will have to learn about your hometown to perform the sacrifice, so there's no reason for you to stay so quiet unless you want to anger me."

"I'm from Mystic Falls," she says. "We're overrun with vampires."

"I asked for names, love," he says. "And I will compel them out of you if you don't tell me. I'm offering you a chance to not be on my bad side."

"Salvatore," she says, and then shuts her eyes, feeling like the worst person in the world.

"Stefan Salvatore?" he says, and now there's real delight in his voice, hungry and dark and too amused for her comfort. "My goodness, you really are a well-connected little thing. How do you know Stefan?"

She didn't reply.

"Don't make me ask you again." The threat in his voice is not even subtle.

"He's my boyfriend."

"Your boyfriend?" He laughs, and then the car speeds up so quickly that Elena is almost scared, only to realize looking out the window that they'd just driven onto a highway.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Right now?" he asks vaguely. "Out of this wretched state and into a city I can actually stand. In the long run?" He grins over at her. "Well. You wouldn't happen know where I could find a moonstone, would you?"

"Katherine has it," she says, and Klaus shoots her a look of surprise.

"And where would I find Katerina, since you know so much?"

Elena swallows. "She's in Mystic Falls," she says. "She's trapped in a tomb with it."

"So she's safely tucked away with it for now," he muses, and then his look turns predatory, and Elena is reminded again that this is the man who's going to kill her. "Quite the bearer of good tidings, aren't we? As far as my doppelgangers go, you're a breath of fresh air, willing and forthcoming as you are. Leagues ahead of Katerina."

"I'm just not stupid," she said.

His eyes darken a little, and for a second she thinks he's going to lunge for her throat again and she feels her heart speed up. He retracts his fangs and laughs. "I'd be inclined to agree, sweetheart."

. . .

He brings her to DC, and Elena is so glad she's been here before on a school trip so that there's no novelty factor.

"You know where the moonstone is," she finds herself saying, because she has no idea what he's doing and it's terrifying. "Why don't you just take it and then do the sacrifice?"

"Do you know what's involved in the sacrifice, Elena?" he asks her, sounding a little detached.

"You need the moonstone, the doppelganger… a werewolf, and a vampire," she says.

"Correct," he replies. "I also need a full moon, though, and unfortunately the moon was already risen by the time I arrived at that disgusting house, so we won't be able to complete the ritual for another month."

Horror washes over her at the thought that she has a month in captivity to look forward to, and he grins, clearly aware of what's going through her mind.

She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. She's been with Klaus for an hour and a half, and she's exhausted, starving, and still hurting where his fangs sank into her skin.

She's terrified when they arrive at a hotel and Klaus compels them the penthouse suite, absolutely terrified; it's hands down the most scared she has ever been in her life, but she forces herself to take steady breaths and resolves that she with not resist anything, because there's nothing she can't endure for Jeremy's sake, for Jenna's sake, for Stefan's sake. She cannot help but tremble in the elevator, but she keeps her head up and her jaw set. Klaus takes her arm and leads her into the room, and she keeps reminding herself that she can take anything.

"Are you wearing any vervain?" he asks. She can't speak, but she shakes her head, and he seizes her chin so she stares in his eyes.

"Do not leave this suite until I tell you otherwise," he says, and unlike Damon and Stefan who are so forceful when they use their compulsion, Klaus's tone is conversational, full of humor, just as it's been for half of what he's said tonight. She narrows her eyes, confused. "I have some business to attend to in this city, but do not attempt to contact anyone other than me while I am out. Be a good little doppelganger and sit tight until I return."

She is beyond relieved, and beyond terrified that this is an elaborate ruse, that he'll start laughing any second, but he does not. He tells her a phone number that she immediately forgets, and he laughs and assures her that if for some reason she needs it, she'll remember it.

She is starving, but she is too afraid to grab anything from the mini fridge, let alone order room service. She wants to shower, but she doesn't have any other clothes (and she is absolutely not willing to be in any state of undress with him near), so instead she just washes her face and neck, hangs her leather jacket up in the closet, and clambers into the massive bed.

She's so tired that she should fall asleep the second her head hits the pillow, but all she can see when she closes her eyes is Klaus biting into her neck and drinking her blood, and all she can think is that, in just one month, he'll do it again and he won't stop until she's dead.

 _You saved Jeremy today_ , she tells herself, and she holds that thought in her mind until she finally drifts off.

. . .

She wakes up to the muffled sound of TV—some news channel or other, she thinks—and is alert immediately. She climbs out of bed and walks to the doorway, looks in on the living room area (the suite really is enormous). Klaus is sitting on a couch, crystal glass of blood in hand, and he grins up at her.

"Look at that, sweetheart," he says, and she recognizes Andie Starr as the anchor, recognizes the channel as WPKW9. "They've got search parties out looking for you."

She doesn't reply. Klaus tilts his head, still grinning, and then suddenly his eyes narrow a bit.

"You don't look well," he says. "Tell me I haven't found myself a chronically ill doppelganger."

She shakes her head. "No, I'm fine."

He examines her for a moment. He looks perplexed, really; Elena wonders when the last time he'd had to think about the health of a human had been. After a few minutes, he lifts his chin.

"How long were you with those riffraff nightwalkers, sweetheart?"

Elena frowns. "I don't—I didn't keep track of time, I don't know."

"What date did they take you?" he asks.

"March 28th," she replies. "It—what day is it?"

"March 31st," he says. "Did they feed you at all?"

She shakes her head.

"Did they refuse to feed you, or did you refuse to ask them for food?" says Klaus, and then laughs. "Don't answer that, it's clear you were taking your martyr act a little too far." He downs the glass of blood and stands up. Unlike her, he's changed his clothes—he's in a dark red button-down shirt. "Well, come on, then. I can't kill you on the next full moon if you starve to death before then."

"Where are we going?" she asks.

He shoots her a bemused smirk. "It looks like I have to keep you alive and well for another month, sweetheart, and human that you are I do believe you need to be fed."

He says it like he's talking about feeding a pet, and she has a horrifying mental image of him giving her food in a dog bowl, but instead he strides to the closet, throws her jacket over to her and puts on a blazer of his own. He walks over to her, his gait casual, and meets her eyes.

"You can leave the room with me," he tells her, voice pleasant. "You will not run, or call for help, or draw anyone's attention in any way, shape, or form. You will do what I tell you for the duration of our little excursion."

"I came willingly," she tells him, even though the compulsion's already set in. "I'm not going to try and run."

"Yes, well, I'm not taking any chances in case you change your mind. Humans are terribly fickle things, you know." He extends his arm to her, again a mockery of politeness, and she takes it because she knows the empty pride of symbolic gestures means nothing sized up against her family's lives.

He doesn't seem the type to offer her any information he doesn't think she needs, but he's not trying to keep her from observing her surroundings, either. She was too terrified last night to take note of anything, but she looks around now. They're in a Four Seasons hotel. There's a Bourbon Grill in the building that she expects him to take her to, just because it's right there, but instead he leads her outside. She doesn't recognize the area (then again, though, all she really knows of DC are the tourist spots she went to in the eighth grade, so unless she was next to a monument or the White House she probably wouldn't recognize anything), but she's rested and it's daylight and it takes a couple of seconds of reading storefronts to surmise they're in Georgetown.

He takes her down to the waterfront, compels them past a long line of guests with reservations to a patio seat at a restaurant. They're given lunch menus, and Elena finally thinks to wonder what the time is.

She doesn't understand any of this. She knew he wouldn't starve her, since he needs her alive and of reasonably sound body in a month's time, but if anything she would have expected the bare minimum in terms of food. She doesn't voice this, of course—she doesn't think it would change his actions but she doesn't want to give him any ideas—but then, she takes in the way he's looking at her and thinks about farm animals being fattened up before the slaughter.

(she's sure her weight makes no difference to the sacrifice, but the parallel still sends dread coursing down her spine.)

She doesn't have the wherewithal to really look at the menu, so when the waitress arrives she just orders the first thing she can read off.

"Two Bloody Marys," Klaus orders, his voice cheery, when she turns his attention to her. "And I'll take mine with your blood, thank you." Both sentences are said in just the same tone, nothing to give away the compulsion, and the waitress nods and walks away.

There are a lot of things Elena would like to say, but she's too scared to say any of them, except: "I'm seventeen."

"Are you really?" asks Klaus, and he seems so enraptured, so delighted with any information he gets from her. "Such a young little thing, to have such bravery."

She has to ask. "I get why you're feeding me," she says, "but…"

He sighs, and it's almost melodramatic. "You're so afraid, love," he says, and there it is, laid out in the open, of course she'd known he knew she was scared all along but there's something different about him pointing it out to her face. "You can hardly even ask me a question. Soon it will make you dull, sweetheart, and I don't like to be bored."

Again, the threat is hardly even veiled. The drinks arrive a minute later and Klaus taps his to hers, though she doesn't reciprocate.

"Come on, little doppelganger," he says. "Where's that Petrova fire? Don't you disappoint me."

There's no pretense of amusement in that one. His voice is dark, bordering on angry.

Elena meets his eyes and knocks back her drink without flinching.

Klaus grins. "That's more like it."


	2. if I should die before I wake

It doesn't take long for her to realize what's going on, of course. She would have expected Klaus to lock her in a room, hooked up to an IV full of fluids and vitamins, with some compelled slave bringing her well-rounded meals three times a day to keep her in good health. It sounds like the careful thing to do. But then Klaus seems to have no worries about taking her out in public, about letting her out in the world; and she realizes after just a couple of days that he is not worried at all about her being taken, or rescued, or getting away. She wonders what it's like, to be that powerful.

She doesn't understand why he doesn't dump her with some lackey, at first, but the way he commands her to drink and probes her for a reaction makes it clear quite quickly; he wants her to be entertaining, or at least, wants her to entertain him. He never tells her what he wants outright, and it's rare that his threats are explicit, but Katherine's words haunt her dreams every night and there's a layer of menace under his every gesture, and it's not as though she thinks Klaus would be the type to lay out rules and punishments for fairness' sake.

She can mostly make it through the days without giving away how afraid she is, but she's racked with fear every night. Nothing ever happens, though; he generally spends the nights out, leaving her alone in the room, and returns with spots of blood on his collar and an all-too chipper attitude.

That's the other thing that frightens her; his moods seem to flip like a switch, and he goes from amused to murderous so quickly that she wonders if one is faked, if he's always in the same mood and just pretends to be volatile to frighten people. His mood swings aren't emotional, either, there's none of the sadness or lack of energy she and Jeremy had been filled with when their parents died. It's entirely in response to the world, and entirely aimed at the world.

On the third day that she's there, he looks her up and down and sighs. "I suppose I really must buy you something else to wear," he says. Elena doesn't like the idea of even getting changed near him, but she has to admit that her clothes are starting to smell.

Still, she can't imagine him taking her out on a shopping trip, and as it turns out, that's not what he has in mind. He pulls out his wallet and hands her a credit card. "Order whatever you want to the hotel," he tells her. "And don't worry about the cost. My funds are hardly limited, and besides, I can't have you trailing me around in rags."

She thinks that Katherine would have made the best of this, and ordered the most expensive designer pieces she could find, but she's not Katherine and the last thing she's willing to do is test Klaus's limits. Besides, wearing her usual type of clothes would be pretty comforting. She orders a few pairs of jeans, a bunch of Henleys and sweaters, a pair of boots, a pair of Converse, a couple of jackets, a pair of very conservative pajamas, and some basic undergarments and toiletries. She shoots a glance over at Klaus, and orders a couple of dresses and a pair of heels as well; if she's prepared for everything, she's a lot less likely to upset him.

The total is more than she would generally pay in a single sitting, but not nearly enough that she thinks he'll be bothered; and she doesn't want to think about how he'd react if she hadn't gotten everything she needed when he'd been generous enough to give her the chance. She runs through a mental list of everything she could possibly need, before signing off of the business center computer and handing the card back to Klaus.

"I assume you paid for the fastest possible shipping," he drawls, sounding beyond annoyed.

"Yes," she replies.

"Good," he says. "Now let's get out of this miserable little room."

He leads the way back up to the suite. It's about the time that he usually heads out, but tonight he shows no sign of doing so. He pours himself a glass of bourbon and sits on the couch, and she stands in the doorway, trying not to tremble, trying to keep her breathing steady.

He looks over at her and frowns, and she knows that he can hear her pounding heart. "To bed with you then," he says.

Fear crawls up through Elena again. She does not move, cannot move, cannot breathe; she feels as though she could shrivel up and die right there. A hint of frustration crosses Klaus's face, and then confusion, and then:

"Oh," he says, and he sounds genuinely surprised. "Oh, _that's_ why you're so terrified. No, I'm not going to force myself on you, you can stop worrying about that." He takes a sip from his drink. "I prefer my women willing."

She can't help a sharp gasp as relief floods through her, can't help the buckling of her knees beneath her. She still has to ask, though: "And if I betray you?"

"Then I'll slaughter everyone you care about, track you down, and torture you to death," says Klaus, sounding bored. "I believe we've been over this part. Go to bed."

She does; it's the easiest time she's had falling asleep since first learning about the sacrifice.

. . .

Some of the new clothes arrive the next day (money really can buy a better everything); for the first time, she feels comfortable enough to shower, though she enters the bathroom fully dressed and keeps her change of clothes on the floor, so she won't have to reenter the room in any state of undress.

Klaus stares at her when she steps out in a Henley and jeans. "Billions of dollars at your disposal and you buy the same godforsaken outfit?" He shakes his head. "Katerina would have done much better."

She could try to make a sassy comment about how Katherine betrayed him, but she keeps her mouth shut and settles for glaring.

"You know, sweetheart, the martyr act was somewhat amusing at first, but it's gotten quite dull by now," he says. "I don't like to be bored. Entertain me."

"Let me call my brother," she says.

She's shocked to have even said it, and Klaus looks surprised as well.

"And why would I do that, sweetheart?"

"You do me a favor, I do you a favor," she tells him, tilting her head.

Klaus laughs. "I did just buy you a new wardrobe, love."

"Your alternative was for me to wear the same dirty clothes every day for a month. That wasn't a favor," she says. "Let me call my brother. Compel me not to tell him where we are, I don't care, but just let me tell him I'm okay."

"Okay?" Klaus seems to find this terribly amusing. "Sweetheart, you'll be dead in a month."

"I won't tell him about the full moon," she says. "Or that the sacrifice will take place in Mystic Falls, I _just_ want to say goodbye."

Klaus smirks. "And you'll do whatever I want?"

"Whatever you want."

Klaus laughs. "You do have some fire in you, after all," he says, grinning. "I was beginning to worry." He spreads his arms, in mock defeat. "Very well, call your dear brother. You have fifteen minutes."

"And after that?" she asked, dreading the answer.

"Whatever I want, isn't that what you said?" Klaus asks, and she shivers. "Oh, don't be so afraid, little doppelganger. You've got a month long free pass with me. In fact, you have the great fortune of knowing exactly when you're going to die, and how it's going to happen." He grins, and she wants to run. She stands still as he tilts her chin up with a finger and compels her. "Go on, then," he says when he's done.

She rushes to the bedroom (closing the door behind her, not that it'll do her any good) and grabs the hotel phone, flips through the instructions to figure out how to make an outgoing call, and then dials Jeremy's cell number as fast as possible.

"Hello?" he says.

"Jeremy!" she exclaims, all her fear and sadness, everything she was trying to keep at bay, spilling out into her voice.

"Elena?" he says, his voice urgent and desperate. "Elena, where are you? What happened? Did you escape? Rose told us you turned yourself over to Klaus—"

"I did," she says, choking on a sob, refusing to let any tears fall from her eyes.

"Elena, how could you do that?"

"He would have killed you, Jeremy," she tells him. "Ask Katherine what happened to her family—he would have killed you, and Jenna, and Caroline and Bonnie and Tyler and Matt, and Stefan, even John—everyone I care about. You were all in danger, Jer—what was I supposed to do?"

"Not give up," Jeremy says, sounding angry, now. "We could stand up to him, fight him together—we're all willing to die for you, Elena."

"But I'm not willing to let you die for me," she says. "Or because of me. Jer, I would die for you too—how could you not understand—"

"Where are you?" Jeremy asks.

"Jer, I can't tell you that," she says. "Don't—don't try to find me."

"What's he doing, is he hurting you?"

"Jer, I'm fine," she says. "Please, Jer—I'm okay."

"Okay?" he asks. "Elena, you'll be dead before May."

"I know," she says, and swallows. "I know. Jeremy, I'm so sorry, you have to know I wouldn't leave you if I had another choice—"

"You did have another choice," he says.

"Putting your life at risk wasn't a choice," she says. "That wasn't—Jeremy, I'm sorry, but I couldn't let that happen. I'm okay, you're going to be okay without me."

Jeremy doesn't reply.

"Jeremy, I love you," she says.

"I love you too," he says. "But this isn't goodbye."

There was a moment of silence, and then:

"Elena, I need you to tell me exactly where you are," says John.

Elena swallows. "Uncle John, put Jeremy back on the phone."

"Not until you tell me where to come find you," he says.

"Uncle John—"

"—your boyfriend is on his way over here—"

"Uncle John!"

"—and the history professor, he's coming too—"

"Dad!"

She doesn't want to say it, but she knows it'll make him stop talking, and it does. She takes a breath, and then speaks again, quietly and quickly.

"Listen to me," she says, trying and failing to keep her fear out of her voice. "He gave me permission to call Jeremy. Okay? Jeremy, for fifteen minutes, that was the deal. You need to put Jeremy on the phone _right now_ before he comes in here and—"

"What is it?" says Jeremy's voice, and Elena breathes a sigh of relief. "Oh. Fifteen minutes on the phone with me?"

"That was the deal," she says.

"What—sorry, Uncle John is asking something." A pause—she hears muffled speaking in the background. "If you made a deal, what did you offer him in return?"

"Don't make me answer that," says Elena.

"Elena, what did you—"

"Jeremy, please," she says. "It's fine. I'm fine. He's not going to hurt me until the sacrifice." She swallows. "Not as long as I don't betray him."

"As long as you don't—" He cuts himself off, and she knows John is feeding him questions to ask, but that isn't technically against the rules. "When's the sacrifice?" he asks.

"I can't tell you that," she says.

Jeremy groans. "Don't be like that, Elena—"

"Jer, he compelled me," she says. "When he agreed to let me call you. And now we have—" she shoots a look at the clock—"only eleven minutes left."

"Okay, okay," says Jeremy. "He compelled her," she hears him say to John. "Can you find a loophole?" he asks, after a moment.

"Please don't ask me to try to," she begs.

Jeremy sighs. "It's like you don't even want us to—"

"I don't, Jeremy!" she says. "I don't want you to save me, I don't want us to find a loophole, because if I so much as try to find a loophole then I'll be betraying him and then he'll kill you."

Jeremy scoffs. "Betraying—"

"I don't make the rules!"

"But you already handed yourself over to him, what more could he want?" asks Jeremy.

Elena rubs her hand across her forehead. "There's really no rulebook for this, Jer," she says.

"How do you know—"

"Jeremy, he's not exactly subtle about it," she says, and tries to find a way to say this that Klaus can't get mad at. She resolves that she can be afraid, can talk about things he's done that scare her, but won't outright insult him.

"Well, did he straight up tell you that—"

"Yes, Jer, he did," she says, and sighs. "If I betray him, he will slaughter everyone I care about, track me down, and torture me to death. This isn't—this isn't me being paranoid, okay?"

She looks at the clock. Less than ten minutes left.

"John says he knows—" Jeremy stops. "Sorry. He says I can't tell you, because that would put you in danger."

"Thank you," she says. She's glad that John, for all that he's trying to find a way to save her, at least has the sense to not get her in trouble.

"Wait," says Jeremy. "Katherine and the moonstone are both in the tomb. That means you're going to have to come back, when he needs to—"

"He has lackeys, Jeremy," she says. "He can compel vampires. Don't get your hopes up about this stuff, please."

"But—"

"Eight minutes, Jeremy," she says, and presses her eyes shut. "Let's not do this."

"What am I going to do without you?" Jeremy asks.

Elena wants to cry. "You'll manage," she tells him. "It'll hurt, but you'll manage; Jenna will take care of you, and John, too, and it'll hurt but you'll pull through." She forces herself to smile, even though he can't see her. "And if there's any way for me to watch over you, I will, okay?" she says. "Know that. There's got to be ghosts in this crazy world, or angels, or something, and I'll be watching over you the whole time, for the rest of your life."

"That sounds really creepy," says Jeremy, and she giggles, a little hysterical. "What do you want me to say to people?"

"Tell them how much I love them," she says. "Tell Stefan—tell Stefan that he has to find a way to move on, and tell Jenna that it wasn't her fault, and Alaric, and tell—Damon—that just because I'm not there to yell at him doesn't mean he has a free pass with me." Jeremy laughs at that. "Tell Caroline and Bonnie that they were the greatest friends I ever could have asked for, and tell Tyler and Matt that—god, they don't even know what's happening—tell them that I said goodbye, and that I love them, and that I want the best for them."

Jeremy is silent. Then: "Elena, we have to find a way out of this."

"There isn't one, Jer," she says. "I've made my choice, okay? Please respect that."

"Is this the last time I'm going to talk to you?"

She blinks back tears. "I don't know," she says. "Maybe." She swallows. "Promise me you'll live a good life, okay?" she says. "Promise me you won't be sad forever. You need to—you need to keep doing well in school, go to the college you want, and do what you love, whatever that is. Don't throw your life away."

She looks at the clock, and swallows. Four minutes.

"And please, don't try to save me," she says. "I don't want to be saved. I'm fine now, but if you do something to piss him off, he's just going to punish me for it." She swallows. "Promise me that too."

Jeremy doesn't reply.

"Jeremy—"

"I promise to live a good life and not be sad forever," says Jeremy. "The other part—"

"Jeremy, please." She's afraid again now.

"I can't speak for the others, but I won't do anything to piss him off," he tells her. "That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to find a way to save you. I can't not try."

That's as good as she's going to get, and she knows it.

"I love you, Jeremy," she says.

"I love you too," he replies. He pauses for a moment. "John wants me to tell you he loves you."

She swallows. It's John, of all people, but as much as she can't stand him, he's still family. "Me too," she says, because she can't quite say the words but it doesn't mean they aren't true.

"And time is up!" Just like that, Klaus is in the room and has snatched the phone from her. He shoots her a wicked grin, and pushes a button.

"I was just about to hang up," she says, trying not to sound afraid.

"Elena?" she hears Jeremy say, and realizes that Klaus hadn't hit the off button; he'd hit speakerphone.

There's dread in her stomach. "Hang up the phone, Jeremy."

"Oh, come on, now," says Klaus. "You were only allowed to talk to your brother for fifteen minutes; young Jeremy can talk to me all he likes."

"Is that Klaus?" asks Jeremy.

"Hang up the phone, Jeremy," Elena repeats. "Klaus, please—"

"Klaus?" It's John's voice, now, and Elena goes cold.

"Ah, yes, Uncle John, isn't it?" Klaus is relishing this; she can hear it in his voice, can see it on his face. "You're lucky your niece had the good sense to make you get off the phone, you know. Otherwise, I'd have been forced to drag you all the way from Mystic Falls to kill you in front of her. Would have been terribly inconvenient."

Elena is both seething and out of a fight. "I told you, I'm not Katherine. I'm not _stupid_. Klaus, please, just hang up the phone."

Klaus shakes his head at her. "I've already done you one favor today, sweetheart, and—what did you promise me in return, again? Oh, of course—whatever I want."

John's voice crackles through the line. "Klaus, don't you dare—"

"Uncle John, please," she says. "It's fine, I'm fine, please—"

There's a moment of silence. "I love you, Elena," John says, and hangs up. She sighs in relief, then looks up and meets Klaus's eyes.

"What now?" she says. She can't keep the hatred out of her voice.

Klaus grins. "I could use a drink," he says.

It's a dangerous game, but if she does everything right, she thinks maybe, just maybe, she could not lose.

She extends him her arm. There's a flicker of something—surprise, maybe?—across Klaus's face, but he smirks nonetheless.

"Thank you, love," he says, and takes her hand, tilting it back so that her wrist is taut and exposed. Veins spread out under his eyes, and then he bites into her skin.

She doesn't make a sound as he takes a few long pulls. When he pulls away—a little sooner than she'd expected—he retains the face of a monster, even though she knows he can make it fade at will. He grins at her again, baring his fangs, and then wipes a drop of blood from his chin.

"Good form, sweetheart," he says. "Let's get one for you, now." He walks out of the room, beckoning for her to follow. He picks up a crystal tumbler and bites into his hand, dripping some of his blood into a glass. He hands the glass to her, already healed.

She offers him a blank stare.

"No need to waste any of that precious blood," he says, and she wants to bite back that drinking her blood was still wasting it, but she holds her tongue. "Or to go around covered in fang scars."

She takes the glass, and knocks it back, swallowing the thick, hot blood and trying not to choke on it. The scar on her wrist fades almost right away, and she reaches up to her neck to find that the mark from his bite the other day is gone as well.

"There we go," says Klaus. "Good as new."

. . .

He takes her to a bar. When she asks why, he laughs, tells her that this had been what he meant by a drink, but he wasn't going to refuse her offer (and she feels stupid, hearing this). Besides the sacrifice, she doesn't know what he could want from her, but she does her best to play along, ordering a drink, saying a few words every so often, smiling at the waiter and telling him they're doing well when he asks.

"Your dutiful obedience is appreciated, of course, but your reluctance to speak is still a bit of a mystery, sweetheart," he says. "I don't think you're particularly shy."

She meets his eyes. "I can't say anything to anger you if I don't say anything at all," she tells him.

He laughs. "You Petrovas do have quite the keen survival instinct, even handing yourself over to death."

She isn't sure she wants to know, but he's already talking about death and the question haunts her every thought. "What happens at the sacrifice?" she asks, grip tight around her glass.

Klaus offers her a dark grin. "Ah, my favorite topic of conversation as well," he says, and takes a sip of his drink. "Very well, I suppose there's no harm in telling you. First, a witch channels the power of the full moon to release the spell bound within the moonstone. Then, I sacrifice a werewolf and a vampire, in that order, and squeeze the blood from their hearts." He reaches over and taps his glass to hers, and ice runs down her spine. "Then, for the grand finale, I drink your blood until the point of your death. You die, I become a full-fledged hybrid—"

"A what?" she asks.

Klaus gives her a funny look. "A hybrid, love. Both a vampire and a werewolf."

Elena frowns. "I thought this was about breaking the sun and the moon curse."

Klaus laughs, leaning back into it. "The sun and the moon curse? Oh, sweetheart, no, no, that's just a sham."

"What?" she asks, chest burning. If there was no curse, if it was a joke, she was dying for no reason at all, he was just going to kill her—

"There's another curse, of course, but it's not the sun and the moon curse. Elijah and I made that up," he tells her.

"Then what's the curse?" she asks.

Klaus pauses and looks at her, as though sizing her up. "I'm both a vampire and a werewolf," he tells her, but doesn't elaborate on how that's possible. "A thousand years ago, a witch cast a curse to bind my werewolf side. I could not access it, and I could not create hybrids, either." He grins. "Still can't. But that won't last long, thanks to you."

She can't meet his eyes. "Did Katherine know that?"

Klaus sighed. "Katerina went running as soon as she heard that there was going to be a sacrifice. She didn't stay around long enough to learn about the curse." He leans forward. "But you, Elena, you came running the moment you heard about the sacrifice!" He lays his hand over hers, a mockery of affection, and Elena sits and bears it and does not pull away. "That's why you're my favorite doppelganger, sweetheart."

The words are said in such a jovial tone, and yet it still sends shivers up Elena's spine.

"Now," he says, leaning back, taking his hand off of hers, "tell me how you met Katerina."

She blinks. "I'm sorry?" She looks up and meets Klaus's eyes, and wishes she hadn't. "Why?"

"You fascinate me," he says simply. "You shouldn't exist—you weren't supposed to exist—and yet you do. You're an enigma, love." He leans forward, just a tiny bit. "And we did strike an agreement."

The words are laced with both amusement and venom, and Elena swallows.

"I first heard about Katherine when I found a picture of her in Stefan's room," she says.

Klaus grins. "Stefan and Katerina? That, I didn't know about."

"She compelled him to be with her when he was human," she says, hoping that his words mean he's 'entertained', or at least not bored. "She turned him in 1864. After I found that picture, he told me about her, how she looked like me, how that was why he saved me from the car crash—"

"Car crash?" he asks, and there's something dangerous in his tone.

She steels herself. "My parents' car went over a bridge last year," she says. "They drowned. I would have too, but Stefan pulled me out, before I knew him."

Klaus smiles again, but there's still something off about him. "I'll have to remember to thank him for that," he says. "To think that the doppelganger line almost ended, and I wouldn't have even known."

Elena half-wishes that it had.

"Go on," he says.

"Katherine first came to town in February," she says. "I didn't meet her for a while, but she impersonated me." She skips over the whole Damon incident. "She cut off my father's fingers and then stabbed him with a steak knife."

"You said your father drowned last year." His words are just a little accusatory.

"I'm adopted," she says. "My birth parents were teenagers."

Klaus leans back in his chair. "There's more to this story."

The last thing she wants is for him to catch her in a lie. "My birth father's brother and his wife adopted me," she says. "They're my parents. I always knew my birth father as my uncle— Uncle John," she says, and sees the recognition in his eyes. "I only found out a few months ago."

"And your mother?" he asks.

Elena swallows. "Isobel Flemming," she says. "She's a vampire now."

Klaus's fingers tapped the side of his glass. "And you know her by reputation only?"

"I've met her," Elena says.

"And?" Klaus seems to be looking for something, but Elena has no idea what.

"And we hate each other," she says, lifting her chin. "She and Katherine were working together. She wants nothing to do with me—she'd kill me in a heartbeat if she needed to."

Klaus chuckles. "Hurts, does it?"

Elena glares at him. "Family isn't blood," she says. "It's the people you choose and who choose you back."

Klaus watches her, and them smiles, wry. "I'd have to say you're wrong, love," he says. "Like it or not, you're stuck with family forever."


	3. whose woods these are I think I know

When she wakes the next morning, Klaus is nowhere to be found; not that she looks particularly hard for him. She wasn't planning on trying to run, but she can feel that even if she did, the compulsion from the other day would keep her here. She showers and dresses—she wears jeans again, but instead of another Henley, she pulls on a white tank top and a dark red cardigan. There's not much for her to do, and she has no idea when Klaus is coming back, so she figures she's well within her rights to call down to room service for something to eat. A few minutes later, she hears a knock on the door, and pulls open the door to meet Elijah.

She doesn't want to gasp so she holds her breath and goes still. Elijah seems surprised to see her, but not shocked. After a moment, his lips twist into a smirk.

"Elena," he says, sounding amused, her name lyrical on his tongue. "We meet again."

She's still holding onto the door when he walks straight into the room, pushing her arm aside like nothing, and then—she doesn't decide to do so, but some compulsion or other must kick in because she's grabbing the phone and dialing a number she doesn't know. Elijah snatches the phone from her, and she tries to reach for it back, even though she actively decides not to do so, but of course it's pointless.

"Brother," says Elijah into the phone, once, Elena figures, Klaus has picked up. "I wasn't sure how to reach you, but your doppelganger did me the kindness of calling your number." He meets her eyes, and again she sees the monster beneath the mask, the force of potential energy beneath the careful façade of control, the same refined horror she saw that day in that house with Rose. "You ought to be more deliberate with your compulsion."

"Elijah!" She can hear Klaus's voice through the phone, he's speaking so loudly. She can't quite catch what comes next, though, but it sounds cheerful. "I hear you tried to bring me my doppelganger," she makes out a few moments later.

"I did," says Elijah, but there's something very cautious in his tone.

"And I heard you failed." She isn't sure if she catches his words or understands them from his tone.

There's another knock on the door.

"What is that?" says Elijah. His words are never as outright threatening as Klaus's, but there is still that edge.

She swallows. "Room service."

"Room service?" Elijah lifts an eyebrow; he looks amused, but his tone is dangerous still.

"I was hungry," she replies.

Elijah hands her the phone, and she presses it to her ear, holding her breath. He strides over to the door and swings it open. The waiter—butler—server—she hasn't stayed in any fancy hotels, so she's not quite sure what he's called—brings a tray of food into the room and places it down on the coffee table. Elijah exchanges pleasantries with him, ever polite, and then closes the door behind him. He comes to stand in front of her; he is so close it hurts her neck to look up at him, but she holds his gaze regardless.

"So Elijah has joined the fold, has he, sweetheart?" says Klaus. Elena doesn't reply—she would nod if Klaus could see her, but he cannot so it doesn't matter. "Well, I'll be back right away. Sit tight." He hangs up.

Elena isn't sure whether she's relieved or not; she honestly couldn't say which of the brothers she's more afraid of.

She sits on the couch, in front of the coffee table, not looking at Elijah but all too aware of where he is, and pours herself her coffee. She's glad that she only ordered coffee and a fruit bowl; somehow, she wouldn't be comfortable eating anything more decadent in front of him. He sits across from her, elegant as ever.

She waits a moment; she does not want to seem desperate for information, so she takes a long, deliberate sip from her mug. "How did you find me?" she asks.

Elijah blinks at her, bemused. "Excuse me?"

"Don't pretend you knew where he was, because you didn't," she says. "He didn't know you'd tried to take me when I told him, and you didn't know his number. How did you find me?"

Elijah looks at her as though reassessing her—no, not quite like that; as though he is cataloguing new information about her, and all that he knows of her is highly amusing. "My brother has not been challenged in nearly a century," he says, a small smile playing on his lips. "He may be paranoid still, but he's grown less thorough; there were a couple of stray bartenders he'd forgotten to compel."

"Mmm," says Elena. She pops a berry in her mouth.

Elijah nods at the room service. "You seem awfully at ease for a kidnapping victim, compared to your demeanor a few days ago," he notes.

Elena takes a long sip of coffee before replying. "I wasn't kidnapped," she says, and despite everything there is something thrilling about knowing something Elijah doesn't. "I surrendered."

There is genuine surprise in Elijah's expression, just as there was when he first saw her in that old house; the smallest slip in self control darts across his face, and for just a moment, he looks both as though he's known her forever and as though he's never seen her before.

"Did you," he says, his words appraising. He seems displeased.

"What?" she asks. She's pretty certain that there's at least some animosity between Klaus and Elijah (she's quite certain, actually, after Klaus's immediate decision to return to her once Elijah showed up), and while she wants to lash out at the both of them, she figures Klaus won't be upset at her for giving Elijah a bit of attitude. "Disappointed you couldn't hand me over yourself?" She frowns. "Let me guess; I was supposed to be your ticket back into Klaus's good graces?"

Elijah no longer has that amusement on his face, but he does not seem to be planning to speak, either. She glares at him for a moment, and then finishes her breakfast in silence. When she's done, she moved to pick up the tray, but Elijah grabs it with one hand and perfect balance.

He grins. "I doubt my brother would appreciate my letting you anywhere near that door again."

She wants to roll her eyes, but thinks that would make her seem her age, and she doesn't want Elijah to patronize her. Instead, she makes for the bathroom and brushes her teeth. She sits down on the same couch again; a few minutes later, the door swings open, and in walks Klaus. She stands, almost on instinct.

It's not relief that she feels; there's no relief in Klaus's presence, in the joy he takes in his taunts or in the steady certainty that he will kill her before the month is out, but somehow she feels just the slightest bit of reassurance. She knows—in morbid detail, now—what Klaus wants. She has no idea what Elijah has in mind.

Klaus grins at her once he enters, and wraps an arm around her waist. It's not painful, but it is possessive, as is the way he drops a kiss on her hair and says "good morning, sweetheart." Only then does he look over to Elijah, and Elena may not have centuries of power plays behind her but she can tell well enough that this is a challenge, a show of strength, a dare to defiance. She does not move, either toward Klaus or away from him; she stares at Elijah and waits to see what he'll do.

Elijah's lips twist, just a little, as he looks at Klaus; then he grins.

"Brother," he says, and Klaus laughs, sounding delighted.

"Ah, Elijah, I have missed you," he says, letting go of Elena. "Come, brother, let me pour you a drink."

A vision of the two of them sharing her blood crosses her mind, but instead Klaus grabs his bottle of bourbon and two glasses. It's not even ten in the morning, and yet somehow she is not surprised.

Elijah sneers, just a little. "Bourbon, brother?"

Klaus laughs again. "Oh, quite right, I'd forgotten how partial you are to scotch. I'm afraid I don't have any here." His grin is wicked. "Would you care to join us for brunch?"

Elijah looks over to Elena, but she has no intentions of commenting that she's eaten, and he says nothing to that effect. "I'd be glad to," he replies, after a moment.

. . .

If Elena's learned anything about Klaus in the past week, it's that he loves his big meals. She doesn't think it's about food, though; Klaus seems to be in his element, in a restaurant, handing out commands and compulsion like candy. She thinks in a big group he would naturally fit at the head of a table, but with simply three of them, she finds herself sharing a cushioned bench with him while Elijah sits across from them, as though on trial.

"So," Klaus says, leaning back in his seat, an impish grin on his face. "Elijah." He draws out the name, each syllable distinctly pronounced and pronounced with distinct relish. "It has been a while, hasn't it?" He holds Elijah's gaze for a long moment, dark amusement in his eyes. "Tell, me, brother, where have you been for the past few years?"

"Here and there. Nowhere of especial note." Elijah seems bored. Elena can't imagine being bored while being questioned by Klaus, can't imagine being anything but terrified. "Must we dwell on my past, Niklaus? I'm much more interested in your recent successes, regarding the matter of doppelgangers."

"Ah, yes, the lovely Elena," says Klaus. He grins down at her, and she meets his gaze but keeps her face blank. "Far prettier than Katerina, wouldn't you say?" He looks back up at Elijah. "I'll have to watch you closely, brother, lest you lose yourself over another Petrova."

This is news to Elena. Questions bubble up in her— _what are you talking about? What happened with Katherine?_ —but she waits until she thinks of a more sophisticated comment. "I sense a story here," she says, glancing up at Klaus and then over to Elijah.

Klaus laughs; it had been the right thing to say. "Ah, Elijah's long had a weakness for that pretty face of yours, sweetheart," he says. "Katerina certainly got the better of him a couple of times."

"And she's certainly paid for it," says Elijah, looking casual as could be while talking about the slaughter of a girl's family. "As a matter of fact, brother, I paid Katerina a visit the other night."

"Did you now?" Klaus leans back, a grin playing on his lips, and stretches out his arms so he has one around Elena. There's no way for her to scoot away or shake him off and be subtle about it, so she resigns herself to it, trying to ignore the pressure where her back is against his chest.

Elijah's upper lip twitches, a perfectly controlled display of disgust. "She's trapped in a tomb under the old church in Mystic Falls," he says.

Klaus looks down at her. "Ah, so you were telling the truth," he says.

"Of course I was," she shoots back. He smiles at that, and then nods at his brother, as though telling him to carry on.

"She's well and tucked away there until you have further need of her," Elijah says, and he flicks some dust off of the sleeve of his jacket. She doesn't know why a little dirt should matter so much to an original vampire – if Damon were here he would have cracked a joke about Elijah collecting dust for hundreds or thousands of years, and it would have been inappropriate and worsened the situation a hundredfold, and it would have made Elena laugh. She would do anything, give anything, for that laugh, right about now.

"As she should be," Klaus replies. "All my doppelgangers, right where I want them. Who would have thought?"

Elena forces herself not to shiver at his delight.

Elena expects Klaus to send her back to the hotel after brunch, but he takes her with him; she wonders if Elijah's finding her has set him on edge. They walk from their restaurant on the waterfront to the Kennedy Center, and Elena doesn't understand but doesn't ask.

"Have you ever been to Washington before, sweetheart?" he asks her as they walk.

"Once," she says. "When I was fourteen."

Klaus smiles; she thinks he likes that she doesn't know the city. "It isn't bad, for an American city," he says. "They brought a Frenchman in to design it, you know. His name was l'Enfant. Before he came, this was just a swamp, an armpit of civilization along the Potomac. The city itself isn't very old; it just pretends to be in the ranks of truly great capitals of Europe." He looks down at her, and she meets his bemused glance. "Have you ever been to Europe?" he asks.

"No," she says, refusing to think _I never will._

"Have you ever been anywhere?"

She frowns at him; she doesn't want to admit how little she's seen of the world. "Not really," she says. "I drove down to Florida with my parents a few times."

"Ah, the great Southern road trip," he says. "I should thank my lucky stars you haven't a southern accent."

She's offended by this, on behalf of her late grandmother most of all, but she doesn't say so.

"So that's it?" he asks. "Washington to Florida?"

"I went on a school trip to Boston once," she says.

Klaus laughs. "Ah, of course. A true American education."

"Were you around for the American Revolution?" she asks, even though she wishes she wasn't curious.

He gives her a strange glance. "I was in New Orleans for most of it," he says.

"Most of it?"

She can't help it; she's always liked history.

Klaus's gaze is searching; after a moment, he smiles at her, slowly, as though he's won a victory. "Rebekah and I hunted at the battle of Yorktown," he says, and Elena doesn't know who Rebekah is but can imagine Klaus, amidst death and horror and surrounded by darkness, feasting on the blood of the fallen. "And then Elijah insisted we travel north to see Washington's final address."

"Did you meet him?"

Klaus's face is openly amused, now, but she doesn't care; if she's going to let him kill her without a fight, she can at least have this. "Washington?" he asks. "Yes, briefly– don't sound so reverent when you speak of him, though. For all your Virginian pride, he was as great a slaver as anyone."

"Wouldn't have taken you for an abolitionist," she says, without even thinking. Something crosses his face, but she can't pin it down, and yet she wishes she hadn't spoken so freely.

"I never liked the way you Americans did slavery," he says, after a moment.

They draw closer to their destination, and while she doesn't care as much for more recent history, she sees an opportunity to change the conversation, and seizes it as a lifeline. "What about Kennedy?" she asks. "Did you know him?"

Klaus smiles at her. "Ah, Jack," he says. "We'll have to save him for another time."

They enter the center. Elena has no idea what they are doing there, but she follows him to the elevator. He stops in a little restaurant on the top floor and grabs a bottle of bourbon and a couple of glasses, and then leads her out onto the terrace.

The view, she thinks, would be incredible at night. It's nice even in the day– the weather is warm, and there are rowers out on the river. She can't tell if they're training or racing.

Klaus pours her drink first, a mockery of a gentleman, but she doesn't take a sip until he's poured his own as well. She knows by now he'd take offense.

He taps his glass to hers, and then, after taking a drink, he laughs. "I have to admit, love, I'm impressed that you haven't asked what we're doing here yet."

She raises her eyebrows, feeling a little bold. "You mean this isn't just a history lesson?"

The risk is worth it; he grins. "We're meeting a friend of mine," he says. "Do be nice, won't you?"

"I always am," she replies.

They meet a male witch named Maddox. Despite Klaus's words, he's clearly more of a servant than a friend; Klaus all but orders him to head to Mystic Falls and make sure that Katherine is trapped in the tomb with no loopholes, so that she's there when they come back for the full moon, and, in the meantime, to acquire the moonstone and bring it back.

Elena takes a long drink when the moonstone comes up; this is, after all, Klaus planning her death. She turns to look down at the river again, and over to the monuments Klaus pointed out while they waited, to Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington. Klaus might have said they were nothing compared to European works of art, but they've still been standing there since long before she was born; they'll still be there centuries after she's gone.

Maddox takes his leave of them, but Klaus doesn't seem inclined to go anywhere soon; he instead pours himself another glass, and tops hers off. They walk around the balcony, now facing the city, until he comes to a sudden stop.

"This is the only part of the balcony where you can get a good view of the Capitol," he says, and points. She looks, and there it is; it looks so small from here. Once, she'd thought it was the most powerful place in the world.

"Is it under construction?" is what she asks.

Klaus smiles. "Always," he says, and then knocks back his drink. "Well?" he asks, after a moment. "Is there anything else you want to see in this city?"

She looks over at him, eyes wide; she thinks she must have misunderstood.

"We'll be leaving tomorrow, of course, sweetheart," he says. "Too many people know where you are by now, and we're far too close to that wretched town of yours, and I happen to be feeling indulgent today. Anything else?"

She'd much rather see the city than be cooped up with her thoughts; she'd much rather be in public, surrounded by people, than alone with him and his temper. Still, she is sure his indulgence has to come with a price, and she does not want him to think even for a second that she doesn't know who has all the power.

"I don't know," she says, trying to sound as deferential as she can. "What do you think is worth seeing?"

She can tell by his smile that it was the right thing to say.

As it turns out, Klaus is a bit of an art buff. He calls them a car and takes her to the National Gallery of Art. She knows she's been here before, but this time she's old enough to appreciate it, and more importantly, she knows this is the last time she'll ever see any of these paintings.

She asks questions; Klaus likes the superiority of knowing all the answers, and she likes the relative safety of Klaus being in a good mood. His favorites seem to be landscapes. She takes a liking to a series of works called _The Voyage of Life_ , and Klaus seems to approve of her choice; he talks about the painter's significance in some American art movement or other, about the mythological and religious allegories of the work, and tells her that the artist has a far superior set of works at another gallery, but she tunes him out, examining the third painting. In it, the man is on a boat, in the midst of a storm headed straight for certain doom, and rather than try to paddle away or plot an escape, he prays and waits. In the very background of the painting, the water is still and calm, and the sky is serene, as though to say that that is where the man is heading.

Elena hopes Klaus doesn't think too much about why she likes it.

He's still in a good mood that night, and they meet Elijah for dinner at some restaurant where the menu lays claim to a number of awards. She's not too sure of what to order – she's never heard of most of the foods before – so she lets Klaus take the lead, which, as expected, he seems to revel in. Elijah orders a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. Elena keeps expecting someone, somewhere to point out how obviously underage she is, but no one ever does; she wonders if there's a slight bit of compulsion happening every time Klaus or Elijah orders, or if they just seem wealthy enough that no one cares what they do.

She wonders what people think of her when they see her with them; she assumes, whenever she's out with Klaus, that she looks like she's dating him, but even though no one could guess at his true age, there's still a clear gap between her own seventeen years and whatever age he was turned at.

Nobody questions it, of course, and it hardly matters.

Elena does not mention what Klaus said about leaving the city in front of Elijah, and Klaus behaves as though he fully intends to meet up with Elijah the following day. She drinks her wine– it is, of course, better than any wine she's ever tasted– and smiles when Klaus cracks a joke and speaks when she knows it's expected. Klaus asks her if she wants dessert; she smiles and declines, and Klaus laughs and orders them each a glass of a dessert wine she's never heard of. It's sickly sweet, and makes her want to retch; she swallows it down with a smile on her face.

Elijah insists on paying for the meal. At first, Elena doesn't understand why it matters, but soon it becomes clear that they aren't debating over who should pay, but rather if they should pay at all. It turns Elena's stomach, to think of these two immortals, playing fast and loose with the livelihoods of innocent people; but then, they play fast and loose with the lives of innocent people, too. Money shouldn't startle her.

She doesn't know if she counts herself in the ranks of those innocents. She doesn't want to think about that too hard.

After a few barbs, Klaus leans back and waves magnanimously at Elijah, and Elijah inclines his head and pulls out a black wallet.

After dinner, Elijah takes off, and Klaus brings Elena to a bar a few blocks over. One the server's brought over his bourbon and her red wine, she learns forward.

"So we're leaving tomorrow?" she says. She doesn't want to outright ask for more details than that.

Klaus grins at her. "I was right in thinking you hadn't forgotten," he says, and the dark pleasure in his voice is frightening to her even now. "Yes, sweetheart. We're leaving."

"I don't have a suitcase," she says, and he laughs.

"Please, love, don't worry yourself about that. Someone else will take care of it." It's so dismissive, and Elena wonders if he'll hire someone whose job it is to pack to take care of things, or if he'll uproot someone else's life for the sake of a simple task. "Just sleep well and look pretty; you don't need to do anything more than that."

"Where are we going?" she asks, and from the look on his face she can tell he's been waiting for her to work up to asking.

He takes a long drink, and then grins. "New York."


	4. doubt truth to be a liar

They go to New York the next day. Klaus charters them a private plane, because of course he does, and when she steps out of the shower the next morning there's already hotel staff packing up all her things. She changes quickly – she doesn't have a phone, so she can't check the weather in New York, but she guesses it's colder than in Washington – and she dries and straightens her hair. She puts on makeup, because damn it, she's going to New York, and by the time Klaus gets back to the room she's ready to go.

They take a black car to the airport and walk straight through security. The plane ride is short; Elena's never been on a plane before, though, and it shows. She stares out the window as the city grows smaller and smaller beneath them, and the world-famous buildings look like toys from the sky. She doesn't peel her gaze from the window until they are up in the clouds, with nothing to see.

She hates herself for being so clearly excited by something so simple, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she still thinks _, now I won't die without having flown._

When they start their descent into New York, she's even more entranced; the pilot circles the whole city for her benefit, and she gasps when she sees the Statue of Liberty. Klaus laughs at her, but she tries to ignore him. If nothing else, she deserved to enjoy this moment.

They're driven into the city, and of course it's amazing, but she tries not to let it show too much. The hotel lobby is luxurious, and when they arrive at the penthouse suite there's a bottle of champagne waiting in a bucket of ice. Someone pops it for them and pours the first glasses, while someone else unpacks their things, and then, when everything is taken care of, they're left alone.

It's all too wonderful. It makes her afraid.

After a couple of glasses of champagne, he takes things a step further, and gives her leave to call her family.

That's when she snaps.

"Why?" she asks.

Klaus laughs, but there's something dangerous in his tone. "I'm sorry, love?"

"Why all of this?" she asks. "I don't understand, I don't know what you want. Why–"

"Hasn't anyone ever told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?" he asks her.

"Wasn't Persephone trapped because she accepted a gift at face value?" she shoots back, and a dark grin flits across his face. She knows a part of him likes it, when she has a backbone, but she also knows she can't push him too far.

"Am I Hades, then, sweetheart?" he asks, and spreads out his arms. "Or are you looking for a way out?"

"Of course not." She sinks back into her chair. "I just don't understand. I don't know what you want, and I don't know what's changed–"

"What's changed?" he asks, and he seems livelier, somehow. "What's changed, love, is that Elijah found you because I left you alone, which means from now on, I'm not letting you out of my sight for a minute. So what I want is to ensure I'm not trapped listening to hysterics, or bored to death by a sullen doppelganger, or forced to witness the sorts of dramatics Katerina was prone to. Of course, I could easily compel you to do as I say and behave as I say, but you're a doppelganger, love. I'm much more interested in what you do on your own."

"Haven't I proven myself by now?" she asks.

He smirks. "You have, haven't you?" he asks. "Which bring me to the second thing that's changed. See, I've realized, Elena, that you aren't the worst company in the world. In fact, your presence can be rather enjoyable, when you're inclined to be charming." He takes a sip of champagne, and she's scared of where this is going, what it could mean for her if Klaus has taken too much of a liking to her. "And since I've already resolved to keep you in my company at all times, I'm of a mind to enjoy it."

"What does that mean?" she asks, even though she's afraid to.

Klaus rolls his eyes. "It means that all you have to do is drink your expensive champagne and smile your pretty Petrova smile, and provided your inclination to martyrdom doesn't begin to grate on my nerves, you'll find the last few weeks of your life to be rather pleasant."

"Just like that," she says, dubious.

He grins, and raises his glass to her. "Just like that."

She stays still for a moment, taking that in. Part of her thinks she should rail against him, refuse to make him happy, wallow in her own tragedy until the time comes for her to die, but she knows there's nothing to be gained from that.

She can be charming for three weeks. She can keep him happy for three weeks. She can be the best company in the world, if it means he's in a good enough mood to let her call home.

She knocks back the rest of her drink and offers him her best smile, the one she's flashing in every yearbook photo of the cheer squad, and heads into the bedroom to call home.

John picks up the phone this time. "Hello?" he asks, his voice careful.

"Uncle John," she says. "It's me."

"Elena." She can hear the relief in his voice, and it's difficult, hearing that much affection from someone she still so deeply resents.

"Hi," she says.

"Jeremy's not here," he says, the words coming fast, "so if you only have permission to talk to–"

"Uncle John, it's fine," she says. "I'm allowed to call my family."

He sighs.

"When will Jeremy be back?" she asks. "And, um. Do you – did you move in?"

"Right after you… left," says John. "Jeremy's at school right now, but I can call in and excuse him–"

"It's okay," she says. She doesn't know what to say to him, her father, so she swallows. "Is Jenna around?"

"She's on campus," John replies.

"How is she?" Elena asks. "Does–"

"Jeremy… explained some things to her," says John. "She's… she's adjusting."

"Yeah," says Elena. "Adjusting." She doesn't want to think of what that looks like, and, as always, she doesn't know what to say to John.

"How are you?" he says. "How are you being treated?

"I'm good," she says, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. She's sure Klaus is listening in.

"Where is he keeping you?" he asks.

Elena's chest constricts. "John, I can't tell you –"

"I don't mean geographically," he says, and she sighs. "Is he feeding you? Do you have clothes? Is–"

"Yes," she replies. "Yes, I'm–I've got everything I need, you don't have to worry about that."

There's a long silence from John's end. "Has he…" She can hear him struggling to speak. "Has he… hurt you?"

She knows what he means, even though he can't say it.

"No," she says, and she tries to sound as sure and confident as she can, so that he isn't left worrying that she's been lying. "No, he hasn't. I'm fine, honestly."

"I'm going to find a way to get you out of this," John says.

Elena closes her eyes. "Please stop saying that."

"I know you don't want to get your hopes up, Elena, but–"

"Don't you get it, John? I don't want to be saved," she says.

"Is Klaus with you?" John asks, his voice suddenly sharp.

Elena frowns. "He's in the other room," she says, and for a moment she's worried that she's giving too much away about where she is.

"Can I speak to him?"

"You want to speak to him?" she says. She's stunned by the request, yes, but she's also sure to repeat it aloud; she's sure Klaus will hear her say that, and will come in if he wants to. She isn't going to ask him otherwise.

"Of course he can speak to me," comes Klaus's voice from the doorway, and Elena looks up, unsurprised. "In fact, I'll do you one better than that. Hang up for a moment, won't you, sweetheart?"

She frowns. "Give me a minute," she says to John, and then does as she's told. She looks up at Klaus, and he grins, beckoning for her to follow him out into the other room.

He turns on the TV, and Elena's about to ask him what the hell is going on when she realizes he's making a video call.

"You have John's number?" she asks.

He laughs. "I've got every number on your phone, sweetheart," he tells her. "Now, be good, won't you? Don't make me regret being so benevolent."

She sets her jaw, ignores the goose bumps she feels forming at his words, and sits in the middle of the couch, facing the TV. Klaus sits in the corner of the couch, a few feet away.

It's a few moments before John picks up, but when he does, it's clear that he went and opened his computer. "Elena?" he says. He looks thinner than she remembers, but she hasn't seen him since he was in the hospital, and there are bags under his eyes.

"So you're the famous uncle father," Klaus says with a grin, and John looks over to him, eyes widening. Of course John's never seen Klaus before; Elena wonders at the fact that Klaus is even letting John see what he looks like. He must be awfully confident in his victory. "Tell me, does your darling Elena look healthy enough for your tastes?"

John looks between them for a moment, and then leans in toward the camera. "Please don't do this," he says, and Elena sighs, clasping her hands and pressing them against her forehead. "Isn't there another way to–"

"John," says Elena, trying to inject a tone of warning into her voice. He can't speak to Klaus like that, she knows he's upset but he can't put all his cards on the table, can't put himself at risk like that, can't put her at risk like that, not after everything she's done–

"Oh, don't worry sweetheart," says Klaus. John flinches visibly at the word 'sweetheart,' and Elena can tell Klaus enjoys his reaction. "I won't hold you accountable for whatever he says; you've proven yourself more loyal than most, by now."

"What does that mean?" asks John. He seems so much more frantic than Elena is used to; it frightens her. She's been counting on her image of him, cool and arrogant and always in control; she doesn't want to think of what this means for the state of the rest of her family.

"John, don't–" _don't let him get you riled up, don't rise to his taunting–_ "I told you, everything's fine."

"Listen to your daughter, John," says Klaus. "Everything is just as it should be. And, since you were foolish enough to ask, no, there is no other way. I've been waiting longer than you could possibly imagine to break this curse. Why shouldn't I take what I'm owed?" His voice has grown mocking and vicious, and Elena tries to keep her heartbeat steady. "Because she's your daughter? I've killed countless men's daughters before, why is yours any different?"

Elena looks to him, and his expression relaxes a little, a lazy smile playing at the corner of his lips. "Of course, she is different, isn't she?" he asks, and slides along the couch towards her. "What a face." He moves to tuck her hair behind her ear. She can't look at him while John watches on, and she can't look at John with Klaus so close to her, so instead she casts her gaze downwards, impassive as a statue. His body is right alongside hers, and when he speaks next, his mouth is at her ear. She looks up despite herself.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I kill her?" Klaus asks John, and his breath is too warm against her neck; she wants to squirm. "Imagine what I might do if I got to keep her."

"Klaus, stop it," she says. She knows he's just trying to get a rise out of John, knows he's counting on the fact that he knows she'll never pull away, but his taunts hit even her too close to home. John doesn't deserve this. She looks up and meets her father's eyes. "Uncle John, I'm fine, I promise."

Something in Klaus seems to shift; he sinks back into the couch, throwing an arm around her with an air of old familiarity. "She's telling the truth, John. I've made an honest woman of her."

He's just kidding around now; she knows him well enough to know she's not upsetting him when she rolls her eyes and shoves him with her shoulder, far too light to be taken as aggressive. He laughs, but doesn't move. "Stop messing with my father, Klaus," she says, and then looks back at John. "I'm fine," she says, trying to sound as sincere as possible. "Everything is fine. I'll call you again when everyone's home."

"Oh, will you, now, sweetheart?" asks Klaus. There's still a laugh in his voice, but there's also an edge to it now.

She looks at him, deferential, peering up through her lashes. "May I?" she asks.

He looks down at her for a moment, and then a satisfied smirk stretches across his face. "You may," he says, magnanimously.

"Thank you," she says, her voice quiet. "Can I have a moment with my father, please?"

Klaus looks at her a moment longer, his eyes lowered. "If you like, sweetheart," he says. His grip on her shoulder tightens for just a moment, and then he stands, and steps out to the balcony.

John looks lost and furious and not at all like the man she's so comfortable hating– and yet, she's still mad, but mad about the way he spoke to Klaus, mad about the fact that he let his fear and desperation get in the way of his common sense. She swallows.

"John, I'm fine, I promise. Don't let him get to you."

John looks at her, and after a moment he collects himself, his face growing cooler. "You told me he wasn't hurting you."

"He isn't," she says. "He's trying to get a rise out of you. He knows I won't stop him."

"Why not?" asks John.

Elena's jaw tenses. "Because one of us has a brain, maybe?" she says. "What were you thinking, John?"

John presses his lips together. "I'm thinking that there must be something to bargain with–"

"Well, stop," she says. "Stop before you ruin everything." She turns to look out the balcony window, half-expecting Klaus to be gesturing for her to finish up. He isn't, but she doesn't want to try him. "I need to go before he gets impatient," she says. "But I'll call again when I can – sometime when everyone's home."

When she'd been on the phone with Jeremy, John had had Jeremy tell her he loved her. Now that they're face to face, neither of them can quite get the words out.

"Take care of yourself, Elena," John says to her.

She takes a deep breath. "You, too," she says.

John looks at her for a moment longer, and then hangs up.

Elena isn't entirely sure how to work the TV, so she leaves it be and stands up. She's wearing a black sweater with a white camisole underneath, and instead of her usual converse she's wearing black leather boots. It's chilly outside– she should probably throw on a jacket, before they go anywhere–but for now, she heads straight out onto the balcony, wrapping her arms around herself when the wind hits her.

Klaus turns to her and smiles; he looks genuinely pleased to see her, but there's still a dark glint in his eye. "Sweetheart," he says, "come here."

She walks over to where he's standing, at the edge of the balcony, and looks out at the city. This is the tallest building she's ever been in, she's sure, the highest place she's ever stood. She feels like she's in a fairytale; a real, old fairytale, where the little girl is eaten by the wolf, where the mermaid dies at the end, where the damsel wakes up to find her whole family dead and her whole future stolen. She's the princess locked in a tower, and no matter how many people try no one can save her from the dragon.

Klaus puts his hands on the railing, on either side of her, so his chest is pressed against her back. He's warm – she hates herself for taking even the slightest bit of comfort in that, no matter how cold the weather – and she stands still and looks out at the skyscrapers. Klaus props his chin on her head, and she's acutely aware of the fact that he surrounds her in every direction, that her shoulders are encased by his broader ones and that his arms have her all but locked against him. Inside, on the couch, he'd sat close and stroked her cheek to mark his property in front of John; now, it's his subtle reminder to her.

To anyone else, looking over at them, they would look at ease, domestic. There's nothing painful in his hold, and there doesn't need to be. She knows as clear as day what Klaus is telling her.

 _Stay still. Don't run. Look how easy everything will be if you only do as I say_.

She wonders if this is what his grip will feel like when he kills her.

. . .

When they were freshman, Elena, Bonnie, and Caroline had planned out their graduation trip to New York. They'd had it all figured out; they'd put on little black dresses and big sunglasses and take photos outside Tiffany's; they'd tour the NBC studios, where Caroline would inevitably be working as a broadcast journalist; they'd get tickets to see the Rockettes dance, and then be even better at the routines when they practiced them together later.

Of course, Elena wasn't going to bring up any of those things to Klaus when he asked her what she wanted to see. She knew he'd be happier – and everyone would be safer – if she let him do as he pleased.

He takes her to a top-floor restaurant with a brilliant view of the city and, predictably, excellent food. She thinks that after this he'll take her to another museum, or to an expensive bar, but instead, he takes her to a jewelry store near Central Park, someplace British, and she's pretty sure you actually need a consultation to go in (that is, if you can't compel your way through.)

He buys her a necklace with more diamonds and rubies on it than she's ever seen in her entire life. It had to be rubies, of course; he told the man helping them that he likes the color against her skin (and even if it sounded sweet to anyone else, she knows exactly what he means by that.) He actually pays for the necklace, too, uses a credit card and everything, and he makes sure she hears how much it costs.

(She didn't know that there _were_ necklaces that cost millions.)

Klaus is putting on a show, of course; he always is. She's a doll he's playing dress up with, a prized toy he's putting on display, and when he clasps the necklace behind her neck, his fingers brushing against the base of her head, it feels like being branded. When they get back to the hotel, Klaus has had someone go out and buy more clothes for her, designer shoes and dresses and handbags Caroline once would have died for, but the sight turns her stomach. He tells her to put on something nice for dinner, and she does, now as terrified as ever.

This isn't like a boy giving a girl gifts to win her affection; this is Klaus marking his territory. Everything she wears, everything she eats, every bed she sleeps in belongs to him, and it has since the beginning, but it's much harder to forget when everything comes with the kind of price tag that makes bile rise in her throat.

She wears the necklace he bought her – how could she not? – and a strapless red dress, and pulls on nude heels that she knows will kill her feet before the night is out. She wears her hair down and straight, because she can't risk reminding him of Katherine anymore than she always does, and throws a black coat over her arm.

Klaus looks her up and down when she walks into the sitting room, and grins his approval. She hates it, hates being on display for him, hates needing to try and gain his approval over and over again. After a moment, he stands, takes her coat from her and helps her put it on, and then offers her his arm, knowing she can't refuse it.

She takes it.

They do go to an art museum, now; there's some sort of gala at the Met, and while she's sure he's sincere in liking art, she's right in assuming he didn't drag her out here just for pleasure.

"Nik," says a male voice, and Elena turns to see a young man who looks–well, who looks a lot like Klaus, quite frankly–walk toward them. "How on earth did you manage to get a girl who looks like that on your arm?"

He could mean that she's beautiful, be speaking the way men sometimes tease each other about women; he could mean that he knows she's a doppelganger, and he's congratulating Klaus on his victory; this could all just be a test, set up by Klaus; Elena doesn't know anymore, doesn't trust anything anymore. She offers a close-mouthed smile.

Klaus grins, with what seems like genuine pleasure. "Lucien," he says. "Allow me to present the lovely Elena."

"Elena," says Lucien, saying her name with the slightest accent. He places a hand on her waist and kisses her cheek, and she returns the gesture, the picture of etiquette; she wasn't in the Miss Mystic Court for nothing. "Beautiful name, beautiful girl. Tell me, Elena, does your family happen to be from Eastern Europe?"

She doesn't know if he's genuinely asking, or alluding at knowledge about Katherine. Either way, her chest constricts at the question, at the fear that it'll make Klaus think of Katherine's origin.

Klaus went to Bulgaria to slaughter Katherine's family, once.

She forces a smile. "Once upon a time, I think, but we've been stateside for centuries." She turns to Klaus, makes herself giggle, just a little. "And thank you for my introduction, by the way."

"Sorry, sweetheart," says Klaus with a laugh. "This is Lucien Castle. Ignore everything he says; he's a scoundrel, through and through."

"And yet don't you love to remind me that you taught me everything I know?" Lucien asks. Elena laughs, as though the entire exchange is terribly charming. "Not to be rude, but I actually have some clients here, so I'll have to excuse myself." He points a finger at Klaus. "Drinks. Tomorrow," he says, and then nods in Elena's direction. "I hope to see you there as well."

After he's slipped away, Elena looks over at Klaus, and raises her eyebrows, just a little.

"An old friend," he tells her, and doesn't say more.

They walk around the museum a little longer, Klaus prattling on about certain painters or movements; she knows the Met has art from every corner of the world, but Klaus is focused on European art, and she isn't going to challenge his elitism. She likes every iteration of Madonna and Child, even though they're all pretty much the same; maybe that's why she likes them all, the certainty of the narrative, Mary's image repeated again and again through time, her face branded onto the collective history of humanity by powers beyond her control.

When they get back to the hotel, she hardly has a choice but to wear one of the nightgowns Klaus had bought for her. She's pretty sure he didn't actually pick everything – she refuses to contemplate the thought – but she knows she has to seem appreciative, and if wearing the clothes he buys her means she gets to talk to her family, she doesn't need to think twice about it. She chooses a black nightgown; the back scoops a bit low for her liking, but the dress falls to her ankles. There's no such thing as a dress that doesn't show her cleavage, but this neckline doesn't fall low enough to make her uncomfortable, so there's that, at least.

She's ready to pass out, and her ankles are blistered and killing her, but she's not done quite yet.

"Klaus?" she says, stepping out into the living room. "Are you still here?"

He appears in front of her in a flash. "'Course I am, sweetheart," he says, and then looks down at her nightgown. "It suits you."

"When are we getting drinks with Lucien?" she asks.

The look he gives her says he doesn't know why she's asking him now. "Mid-afternoon, I suppose."

"How do you want me to look?" she asks, and he raises an eyebrow.

"Why do you ask?" He's smirking, now.

"It's clear you've known him for centuries," she says, and he smiles at that. "Does he know about the doppelganger?"

Klaus frowns. "Honestly, I don't know," he says, and then grins at her. "Just look lovely, sweetheart. I'll handle the rest."

That does seem to be the arrangement, these days.


	5. hell is empty, all the devils are here

The next morning, she pulls on a warm black robe, makes herself a coffee from the little pod machine in the room, and joins Klaus out on the balcony.

He smiles at her; he's glad, she thinks, that she came out on her own. She pulls her robe tighter around herself against the cold and holds her mug in two hands, drawing warmth from the heated ceramic of the cup.

"What's on for today, then?" she asks, peering up at him from under her lashes. He grins down at her, like a benevolent king bestowing his favor on a subject.

"Don't you remember, sweetheart?" he asks. "Drinks with my old friend Lucien."

"What is it you want from him?" she asks. He blinks at her. "We went to that gala because you knew he was going to be there," she says. "You didn't just go to catch up with a friend. There's something you want from him, or with him – there's some purpose you want him to serve. What is it?"

Klaus looks bemused and a little pleased. "I do so love that you're more than a pretty face," he tells her. "Yes, sweetheart, there is something I want with Lucien."

"Is this the part where you tell me it doesn't concern me?" she asks.

Klaus laughs. "It doesn't concern you," he says, "but I'll tell you some, anyhow. I've been informed that Lucien's been doing a bit of research, of late. I've no interest in him knowing that I know, but there are aspects of his research that are of particular interest to me."

"And what do you want me to do?" she asks.

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

She tilts her head and fixes him with a smile she knows doesn't reach her eyes. "I'm being cooperative," she tells him.

He looks surprised – genuinely surprised, and his gaze seems to be searching hers. "You want something," he says, after a long moment.

"You know exactly what I want," she returns. "I want my family and loved ones to be safe. I've been upfront about that all along." She raises an eyebrow. "You told me that you don't want to be bored to death by my… what was it? 'Inclination to martyrdom?' Well, this is me acquiescing." She lifts her chin toward him. "So what do you want me to do?"

He stares at her for a few moments, and then laughs, sounding delighted. "You are a Petrova, aren't you?" he says. "And full of surprises. I have to admit, love, I'm growing to rather enjoy you. Pity our time together has an expiry date."

"Pity," she says, letting her lips purse into the smallest hint of a smile.

He laughs again, and looks out at the city skyline for a moment, then looks back at her. "Well, in that case, sweetheart, you might find yourself taking especial interest in Lucien's travels of late, especially on this side of the Atlantic." He looks her up and town, taking his time. "And, petite, dark-haired thing that you are, if memory serves you might be Lucien's very type." He smirks at her, eyes dark. "Do be careful, though, love. I have a history of being the jealous type, after all."

She swallows, but holds his gaze. "Too bad," she replies, letting the sarcasm seep into her tone more than she usually would, to ensure he doesn't mistake her meaning. "And here I was planning to run into the sunset with him."

Klaus's gaze lightens just a bit, and his smirk grows into a proper smile. "I suppose we must all make sacrifices," he says. She knows the use of the word is intentional, but she refuses to let it sway her.

She puts on a black dress that makes her look like a doll. When the time comes for cocktails, they meet Lucien at some swanky lounge on the top floor of a skyscraper, and Lucien is in a blood red button-up, already waiting.

"Ah, Nik!" he says, jumping to his feet and striding across the room. "I was beginning to fear you were standing me up!" He looks at Elena, and there's a flicker of interest in his eyes. "And the lovely Elena, of course," he says. He takes her hand and kisses it. "I'm glad Nik isn't keeping you all to yourself. Come along, now; I've procured us the best view in the joint."

She's a bit offended at Lucien's raised eyebrow when she orders her bourbon by name – she's from the south, she's a cheerleader and she used to run her school's party crowd, she knows how to drink – but his gaze is impressed, not patronizing. She feels a little tingle of pride when Klaus orders the same thing she did.

"I've never been before," Elena replies when Lucien asks what brings them to New York.

Lucien's eyebrows jump up at that. "You've never been to New York?" he asks.

She laughs, knowing it's charming. "I've never really been anywhere, to be honest," she says. "I take it you have?"

Lucien grins. "Travel, dear Elena, is my first and greatest love," he says, leaning back. "So tell me, where in the world would you most like to go?"

Elena bites her lip. "I know the cultured response would be Europe," she says, and gets a laugh in response. "To be honest, though, I feel like there's so much to see on this side of the world first. I mean, I've never even been to the Grand Canyon."

"The Grand Canyon's hardly as exciting as you Americans prop it up to be," Lucien says. "It's impressive, I suppose, but so is Las Vegas, and I don't intend that as a compliment."

She swirls her drink and leans forward, just a little. "Fine, then," she says with a smile. "Where do you recommend?"

"Oh, where do I even begin?" he says. If he wasn't flirting before, he is now.

Elena raises her eyebrows at him, but lets a grin spread across her face. "Okay," she says. "Where do you recommend that, I don't know, you've been lately?"

"Better," Lucien says, with a grin. "I've been travelling a lot longer than you'd think."

She tilts her head. "I can guess," she says.

There's the flicker of interest again.

"I was in Tennessee a couple of months ago," he says, after a moment.

Elena groans with good nature. "Don't tell me you're a country fanatic."

"Not quite," he replies, sounding a little horrified. "I am quite the food aficionado, though, and Nashville's got more than you'd expect to offer." He takes a sip of his drink. "And let me tell you, Elena, the nightlife there is something to be seen."

He smiles as though he's said something very funny, that he's certain she won't pick up on.

 _Werewolves_ , she thinks. That has to be the research Klaus is interested in.

She raises her glass. "Well, I am a fan of the way they drink in the South," she says. "Anywhere else you'd recommend?"

"Have you ever been out to the West Coast?" he asks.

She shakes her head.

"Well," he says, leaning forward. "Everyone will tell you San Francisco's the place to go – and don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful little city – but Seattle's really where you want to visit."

"The Hipster Capital?" she quips. "Somehow I can't imagine you in fake glasses and flannel."

He laughs. "God, no, never. But it is a beautiful city. I'm in land development these days, you see, so I spend quite a lot of time in the Northwest for my work. I was in Portland too, just last month, and there's lots to appreciate there, but… the people are just a little too invested in protecting the environment and local wildlife for my tastes."

Local wildlife. _Jackpot_.

Elena grins. "I've always wanted to see if West Coast coffee is as good as they say."

"Oh, it really is, darling," he says. "Nothing compares to a proper French Roast, of course, but for America, it's better than I'd have ever expected."

"I take offense to that," she says, with a giggle.

Lucien smiles. "Oh, don't, sweetheart," he says. "That an exquisite creature like yourself was born over here is proof enough that this country isn't a waste."

Elena laughs, even though she feels a pit digging at the bottom of her stomach. Again, she can't tell if that's a compliment or a sly comment on the fact that she's a doppelganger.

"But when it comes to American sightseeing," Klaus intercedes, "I think we'd both agree that New York is the place to start."

"Oh, absolutely," Lucien affirms. "To Manhattan." He raises his glass, and Elena taps hers against his, and holds his gaze, unflinching, as she knocks back the rest of the drink.

"So it's werewolves," she says to Klaus, a few hours later, when they're back at the hotel.

Klaus pauses, and looks at her.

"Lucien's research," she says. "Why are you interested, though? Is it related to the hybrid thing?"

"I hadn't realized you'd picked up on that," Klaus says, sounding a little taken aback.

"More than a pretty face, remember?" she replies. "So is it?"

Klaus gives her an even look.

"Who exactly do you think I'm going to tell?" she asks.

Klaus smiles at that. "You're not wrong," is all he'll reply.

"Is that where we're headed next, then?" she asks. She's not willing to stop pushing, even though she knows this isn't smart. "Portland? Nashville? Seattle?"

"Of course not," Klaus says, sounding a bit offended that she's even asking. "I can conduct my research whenever I want, sweetheart. _I_ have all the time in the world." He raises an eyebrow at her, letting his gaze linger at the base of her neck, and she swallows.

Elena isn't surprised when they leave New York the next day. She is a bit disappointed, though – not that she voices that. The next city he brings her to is Chicago, and they stay there for a full week; it's clear Klaus loves the city, but she isn't quite sure why, and he never volunteers the information. He brings her to museums, to jazz clubs – at one point, he offers her his hand, and seems surprised when she takes it and lets him lead her out onto the dance floor. She's in dark skinny jeans and a sequined red top, and something about dancing in a bar makes her feel more like herself than she has in a while, and she's gotten used to Klaus looking at her like the big bad wolf he is.

After Chicago, they go to Montreal; Elena's never been to Canada, doesn't even have a passport, but of course that's of no concern. He tells her it's the closest she'll ever get to going to Europe, and that stings deep down, somewhere she's been burying for weeks now.

Jenna had jokingly told her that they'd go to Montreal for her 18th birthday, so that she could have a legal drink. Now, Elena will never have either.

Klaus takes her to a fancy restaurant where everything on the menu is in French. She refuses to ask him to translate, so she orders Filet Mignon, since she at least knows what it is. He orders a bottle of red wine with a price tag that would have shocked her a month ago but now seems almost reasonable.

She's a bit tipsy by the time they leave the restaurant, and when her heel snags on the cobblestones of the street, she reaches out to grab Klaus's shoulder to steady herself, without thinking. Klaus's head snaps toward her, eyes narrowed, and she realizes that, while of course he's touched her plenty of times, this is the first time she's ever initiated physical contact with him.

She doesn't pull away her hand once she's stable on her feet, just looks up at him. It's chilly, even though it's April, and now that the sun's gone down it feels even colder, and while it had been drizzling rain before they went into the restaurant there are now flurries of snow falling in her hair, turning to cold water against the warm skin of her neck, her collarbone. She takes a breath, and sees fog when she exhales.

Klaus takes her hand at the wrist and removes it from his arm, gently, the pad of his thumb pressed against the middle of her palm. She can feel her pulse against his touch, bouncing as though trying to free itself from her skin.

His gaze is searing, and she feels flushed under its heat, even though the rest of her body is cold as ice.

A gust of wind slaps her cheeks, blowing strands of her hair up into her face. When it dies down, Klaus lets go of her hand, and reaches to her neck, pulling her hair away like a dark curtain opening to display a stage. His bare fingers trail against the base of her neck for a long moment. She gulps; his skin against hers is like pinpricks, but she doesn't want him to move his hand. She never imagined for a second that she wouldn't.

Snow falls against her eyelashes, and she blinks a few times until it melts.

Klaus's hand falls away, and Elena doesn't feel relieved.

He offers her his arm. "I can't have my doppelganger cracking her head against the pavement because she's had a few too many, can I?" he asks. She doesn't laugh in response, but she does smile, and tucks her hand in against his elbow.

The sacrifice grows sooner every day. In a short matter of time, he'll sweep her hair back again, and the weight of his hand on her skin, of his lips on her neck, will feel almost like a lover's, until he rips his fangs into her flesh and drains her of all of her blood.

She's always been aware of his proximity to her, of the shadow of a predator looming behind, but as they walk back to the hotel, she's aware for entirely different reasons.

She tells him she doesn't feel well the next morning, and she does have period cramps, it's not a total lie, but in all honesty she just doesn't want to go out for more drinks and meals and dances and casual flirtation. She needs to take a minute, needs to ground herself, needs to remind herself that while she's living in the lap of luxury, everyone she loves is mourning her. She's been letting herself forget what's coming, because worry was no way to pass the month, but now that month is almost up and she needs to start preparing herself to die.

She lies in bed most of the day, and Klaus is there – Klaus doesn't leave her alone, not after Elijah tracked her down that one time – but he doesn't bother her, and stays in the other room. She has no idea what he's doing, and she doesn't care.

When she sleeps, she dreams of the sacrifice. It's in a different place every time; sometimes by the lake, sometimes in the woods, sometimes in the graveyard, sometimes in an old castle her mind probably snatched from a movie. Klaus is different in each dream, too; in one, he'll be every inch the monster, striking her down, teeth tearing through her skin while she screams, and then in the next, he'll be tender, kissing her neck before biting her, being careful not to hurt her for a moment.

Every dream has one thing in common, though: she always dies.

She wakes up after her last nightmare having sweat through her clothes, through the sheets; it's still dark, but it's morning, not night, and she doesn't want to sleep again, so she draws herself a bath and soaks for a while. She leans back, letting her head slip down under the water, and for a moment she's seized by the urge to just stay there, let the air slip away until she falls asleep and drowns, the way she was supposed to a year ago.

It's a nice fantasy, but she gave her word, she made a deal. She sits back up, washes the rest of her, and walks back into her room with a warm robe wrapped around her, just in time to see dawn breaking the night sky.

The day after, she gets permission to call her family, and finds out that Jenna has been let into the secret of where Elena is and what's going to happen to her, and Elena's furious. It was one thing for Jenna to know about vampires, to explain Elena's absence, to keep her safe – this was something else.

"You were supposed to take care of her, John!" she says, her voice almost at a shout. "I trusted you to take care of her!"

"She has a right to know, Elena," John says, his voice even and infuriating.

"Who cares about rights at this point?" she asks. "How is it fair to burden her with knowing? She shouldn't have to feel this helpless–"

"Elena?" she hears Jenna ask, and falls silent.

It's all she can do not to cry when she sees Jenna's face, but she manages to keep her tears from falling from her eyes. "Aunt Jenna," she says.

"Elena–" Jenna cuts herself off.

Elena shakes her head. "I'm sorry," she tells her. "I'm so sorry that I never told you. I wanted to, so many times, but I wanted you to be safe, you had to be safe, and there's nothing you can do–"

Jenna's crying openly. "You can't just expect me to let you die, Elena!" She sniffles, and it breaks Elena's heart. "I'm supposed to take care of you, your parents trusted me to–"

"You can't, Jenna," Elena says, and takes a deep breath. "This is why I didn't want her to know," she tells John, voice accusatory. "I know it's not fair, but it's not your fault, okay? My parents couldn't have kept me safe, either."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Jenna asks.

Elena swallows. "Don't try to do something to stop it," she says. "I'm serious. If you want to do right by me, then stay safe. Don't get yourself killed, don't… don't throw your life away on a lost cause. Okay?"

"Elena–" Jenna says.

"Oh, is this the famous Aunt Jenna?" Klaus walks in from the balcony, with his usual terrible timing, and as much as Elena is furious that he's about to torment Jenna she can't help but roll her eyes at his dramatics.

Jenna starts. "Is that Klaus?" she asks.

Elena sighs. "You should get off," she tells Jenna. "I love you. So much."

"Get off?" Klaus asks, and then plants himself next to Elena on the couch. "And here I thought I was going to get to meet her."

Elena offers him a tight-lipped smile. "I'd kind of rather you didn't, actually," she says.

Klaus laughs. "Oh, no. I'm wounded."

"Let me get out my violin," Elena retorts, and Klaus grins at her.

Jenna looks confused.

"Anyhow, finish up, would you?" Klaus stands, and walks back out to the balcony. "I'm getting bored."

Elena rolls her eyes. "I have to go now," she says to Jenna.

Jenna is frowning at her. "That's Klaus?" she asks.

"Oh. Yeah." Elena runs a hand through her hair, pulling through some knots as she does. "He's – don't mind him, he's just trying to get a rise out of someone."

Jenna doesn't look appeased. "That's the man who wants to kill you," she says. There's an urgency to her tone that's unsettling.

Elena presses her lips together, and smooths out her jeans, hands stopping at her knees. "Yes," she replies.

Jenna's lip trembles. "Elena–"

"Jenna, please don't do this," she says. "I can handle a lot, okay, but I can't–" She swallows, and then takes a deep breath. "Don't make this harder than it has to be?"

Jenna doesn't nod, but she doesn't object, either.

"I love you," she says, trying to sound as calm and assured as she can.

"I love you," Jenna replies, blinking rapidly.

After they hang up, Elena opens the balcony door, but stays in the hotel room.

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Are you coming out?" he asks.

"Uh, no," Elena says. "It's freezing, and I'm human."

Klaus laughs. "How was your little chat with Aunt Jenna?" he asks, stepping inside and shutting the door. "How is she?"

"She's dandy," Elena says, in a voice that she hopes makes it clear she won't be saying anything more on the subject. "What's on for today?"

Klaus takes a mug from a shelf and makes a coffee from the espresso machine, taking his time, and then hands the mug to her. She takes it, raising an eyebrow. "Thanks, but that doesn't answer my question," she says.

Klaus grins at her, and now she knows that he isn't taking his time because he's avoiding the question; he's deliberately drawing the answer out. "You and I," he says, leaning back against the counter, "are going out on a little trip today."

"Where are we going?" she asks.

Klaus's smile widens. "Well, we'll be flying into Richmond," he tells her, and her breath hitches in her throat. "Our final destination doesn't have an airport, see – but I expect you can guess where we're headed."

Home. They're headed home.

That means it's almost time for the sacrifice. She'd known it was, but now it feels real, now that they're headed to the scene of her death.

She swallows. "When do we leave?"

. . .

She's very quiet for the duration of the trip to the airport, and for the flight, and as they drive back into Mystic Falls. She doesn't know where they're headed, but she's on high alert; she doesn't know who she'll see out on the streets through her window, but she knows that the last thing she wants is to recognize anyone, let alone see someone she loves.

She can't begin to contemplate where in Mystic Falls they'll stay, and she's afraid that he's got it in his mind to go to her house, to compel her to invite him in, except that that makes no sense, every vampire around has been invited into her house, that's just asking for trouble. They don't drive towards her house, though; they drive into town, up to a building that Elena recognizes, but has never assigned any meaning to before, and then come to a stop.

"This is where I leave you, sweetheart," Klaus says.

Elena looks at him, stunned. "What?"

"Oh, don't look so devastated, love," he says, even though she's sure she doesn't. "It's only for a short while. Here," he says, and nods at the sidewalk. Elena looks out the window, and sees the witch – Maddox, if she remembers correctly – standing a few paces away. "You'll be looked after while I'm gone."

"Where are you going?" she asks, still rooted to her seat.

Klaus smiles at her. "You'll find out in time," he says.

She gets out of the car before he has to ask her again, and Maddox leads her into the building and up the stairs.

They walk into an apartment, and she sees Alaric, head down, tied to a chair.

"Oh my god," she says, and rushes over to him, sinking to her knees next to him. He's unconscious; Elena thinks she's going to vomit. She turns back to look at Maddox. "Klaus swore he wouldn't hurt anyone I care about," she says, eyes burning with tears she refuses to shed.

"Your teacher is going to be just fine," Maddox replies. "Klaus will keep his word as long as you keep yours."

"Of course I'll keep it," Elena says. "What do you think I've been doing?"

Maddox ignores her statement. "Now, I need you to step away from the body," he says. "I have work to do."

Elena doesn't move an inch. "What kind of work?" she asks.

"Nothing that will leave lasting damage," Maddox says, sounding annoyed. She doesn't doubt that he'll move her by force if he needs to, so she stands, and takes just one step back. Her eyes scan the room, looking for something familiar, and then land on the most familiar thing of all: herself.

Lying on the floor, unconscious, hair straightened and wearing something out of Elena's closet, is Katherine.


	6. in old days moved heaven and earth

_Dying is an art, like everything else._

 _I do it exceptionally well._

 _-_ Sylvia Plath

 **PART II**

"Why is Katherine here?" Elena asks, spinning around to look at Maddox.

Maddox rolls his eyes. "That isn't my concern, nor is it yours," he replies. "Now, I have work to do, and I suggest you get out of the way."

Elena doesn't need to be told twice. She doesn't want to back over to where Katherine is lying, so instead she goes to the other side of the kitchen counter to watch whatever terrible thing is about to occur.

Maddox stands in front of Alaric's sitting form, hands positioned on either side of his head, chanting something under his breath that Elena can't make out and doesn't try to. It seems to go on forever.

She hears the floorboards creak, she thinks, where Katherine is, and she goes tense, even though she knows Klaus hates Katherine, that Katherine is in more danger here than she is, that – she refuses to think about Katherine, stays still as a statue, and watches Maddox cast his spell.

He comes to a stop. Alaric's head tilts up, and a moment later, he rips the ropes binding him off like they're made of tissue. Alaric stands, and Maddox steps back and bows, like a servant to a liege lord, or a king, and Elena thinks _oh_. It isn't Alaric at all. It's Klaus.

Emily Bennett had possessed Bonnie, once, but Elena hadn't realized that vampires could take over other bodies with the help of witches. It does make some measure of sense. It makes even more sense knowing Klaus; of course he would want to scope out Mystic Falls before announcing his arrival, of course he'd want to know if Elena's friends had some plots concocted against him.

She knows this, and this isn't a _violation_ of her deal with Klaus, exactly, but it still rubs her wrong. This is Alaric's body, and now Klaus can do whatever he wants with it, put it in the way of any harm he likes, and Alaric would be helpless.

She sees, out of the corner of her eye, Katherine rising to her feet, looking more out of sorts than Elena's ever seen her, including the last time they'd spoken, at the tomb. Katherine doesn't seem to have noticed that Elena's there; she, too, is staring at Alaric and Maddox, transfixed.

Alaric – Klaus, Klaus-in-Alaric – turns around.

"Alaric?" Katherine whispers. Elena thinks it's the first time in her life that she's been one step ahead of Katherine. She wishes she were enjoying it more.

Klaus turns to Katherine, and his face – Alaric's face – breaks into a long, slow smile.

Katherine vanishes into a blur, only to come to a stop in Alaric's open doorway, banging into a wall Elena can't see. It's the tomb all over again, Elena thinks, although she'd bet that whatever spell is keeping Katherine in here isn't just limited to imprisoning vampires; Elena doubts she'd be able to leave, either, and she doubts anyone Klaus hasn't vetted could get inside.

Klaus walks toward Katherine, and even though it's Alaric's body Elena can see Klaus in him, now, in the way he walks, the way he holds himself. He hasn't looked at Elena once, not even for a moment, and as twisted as it is a part of Elena resents the idea that she isn't his first priority. She thinks she's earned that position, at the very least.

" _Katerina_ ," he says, the word accented – he says another word before it, but Elena doesn't know it. He takes Katherine's face in his hands, and the movement sends shivers down Elena's spine. "I have missed you," he says, and it's Alaric's voice, Alaric's American accent, and yet somehow it's Klaus's words, Klaus's tone, the way Klaus speaks. Elena feels sick to her stomach.

"Klaus," Katherine whispers. She sounds exactly like Elena – it's like a knife to Elena's gut.

Klaus tucks a strand of Katherine's hair behind her ear. "I'm almost offended it took you that long," he says. "Elena figured it out sooner, didn't you, sweetheart?"

"Elena–" Katherine says, in that same half-whisper, and then her eyes meet Elena's from across the room. Katherine looks scared of her; it's more like looking into a mirror than ever.

Klaus turns to her too, and grins. "Tell me, when did you pick up on my new body?" he asks.

Elena swallows. "When Maddox bowed to you," she says. She's more scared of Klaus, now, with him in an unfamiliar body, than she's been in weeks.

"That's my girl," Klaus says. He lets go of Katherine, who shudders with her whole body as soon as she's out of his grip, and makes his way over to Elena. "Let's see, sweetheart," he says. He takes her by the forearms, and it wouldn't have bothered her as much if it were Klaus himself, but when he's in Alaric's body his disregard for personal space feels all too obvious. "Let's see," he says, looking her up and down. "You've been out of my sight for, what, fifteen, twenty minutes? You don't look any worse for the wear. Well done, Maddox."

He turns over her hand and kisses her at the base of her palm. Elena flinches. "What is it?" he asks, with a grin. "Something has your nerves up."

"That body belongs to my aunt's boyfriend," Elena responds, trying to sound cool. "And my high school teacher. It's all very risqué."

Klaus laughs. "Ah, I see the dilemma," he says, and lets her go, taking a step back. "Very well, then. I'll make sure your dear teacher doesn't break the code of conduct around his students. Not to worry."

Elena forces herself to smirk at that. "I'm touched," she replies.

Klaus grins at her, and for one, perfect moment she just sees Klaus, without any of the body snatchers business. The moment is short-lived.

"Katerina," Klaus says. "Go sit in that chair, would you? I have some questions for you, and I'd really like us to have a nice, civilized, sit-down to chat about it all." He raises an eyebrow at Elena. "Did you know that she's been pretending to be you all this time? Talk about taking over people's lives, I say. Let's hope she kept up your GPA; we wouldn't want your obituary to say you were a poor student towards the end, would we?"

"I never went to class even when I was here, and I did fine," Elena remarks. "It'd take a lot of effort for her to ruin my transcript."

Klaus laughs, sounding delighted. "Oh, I will miss you, sweetheart," he says.

Katherine sits, looking well and terrified.

Last time Elena saw Katherine, Katherine had her hair straightened to look like Elena, too; Katherine was in the tomb, and Katherine had told her the awful truth about Klaus, about the sacrifice, about what had happened to her family.

Two days later, Elena had made Rose take her to Richmond, and handed herself over, to prevent history repeating itself.

For the first time, Elena looks at Katherine and doesn't see a different girl with the same face; she sees herself in five hundred years, if she'd made one wrong choice.

All of a sudden, she's very certain that she doesn't want to hear Klaus's questions or Katherine's answers. "If it's okay, actually, I'd like to get some sleep. I'm tired."

"Hmm?" says Klaus, and looks up at her. "Oh, sure, if you like," he says. "You'll miss one hell of a story, though."

Elena offers him a close-mouthed smile. "I'll live," she says.

Klaus waves her off. "Take the master bedroom," he says, and she does. She isn't sure what's going to happen, but she doesn't want to hear it.

She walks into the bedroom, and there's a photo of Isobel on the bedroom desk.

Elena goes still, gripping the back of the desk chair, the whole world narrowing down to the picture of her mother's face, and then she forces herself to breathe. Alaric is in the photo with her. Alaric – this is Alaric's apartment, she realizes, and takes a long, deep breath. Of course it's Alaric's apartment, it makes perfect sense, it – this is Alaric's bedroom.

If Alaric were here – he is here, but if Alaric were in control of his own body, Alaric would tell her to take his bed, to get some rest, so she does. When she wakes up, sunlight is streaming through the windows, and she walks out into the living room to see Klaus holding up two of Alaric's tops and criticizing his fashion choices.

"Where are you headed?" Elena asks, keeping her voice casual. Katherine turns to look at Elena so fast, it's almost funny. Elena grabs a pot of brewed coffee and pours herself a cup.

"I'm a teacher, aren't I?" Klaus asks. He sounds giddy, and Elena looks up at him in horror.

"You're not going to," she says.

Klaus laughs. "Come on, sweetheart. 'Course I am." He ducks out of view, back into the closet.

Elena doesn't want to think about all the ways this could go wrong. "Do you even know what subject Alaric teaches?" she asks.

"As a matter of fact, I do," he replies, coming back out into the living room in a dark top. "Katerina's been getting me up to date on all the notable aspects of one Mr. Alaric Saltzman, of which there are, I'm afraid, dreadfully few." He smiles over at her. "He teaches History," he says, at last answering her question. "A subject matter which, as you know, I'm quite well-versed in."

"You'll want to avoid mentions of hunting at the battle of Yorktown when you give class lectures, though," Elena says, pouring some milk into her coffee. "That might just give you away."

Klaus waves a finger at her. "A fair point, sweetheart, but I'm hurt by your doubt. I'm quite the actor. I did a turn at the Globe, back in Shakespeare's day, you know."

"No, you didn't," Elena says, smiling despite herself.

She knows this because Klaus is full of shit, and likes to brag about being there for all the big historical events, but he'd never have lowered himself to being a measly actor in Elizabethan England.

She also knows this because she's pretty sure he mentioned something once that placed him in Copenhagen during the 16th century. She'd never offer this up, though – that would be admitting she listened to everything he said.

Klaus smirks and shakes his head. "You know too much about me, sweetheart. I happen to prefer being a man of mystery."

"You might just have to kill me, then," Elena returns. Her voice is a little throaty – it's flirtatious, she realizes. It hadn't been deliberate, but she doesn't want to take it back, either.

Klaus raises his eyebrows, and then laughs, genuine amusement in his tone. "You know what, sweetheart, I just might," he says.

He pours himself a coffee, taps his mug to Elena's, compels Katherine to stay seated right where she is and not do a single thing to cause any physical harm to Elena, and makes for the door. At the last moment, he turns back.

"Oh, by the way, Katerina tells me I'm supposed chaperoning at a '60s decade dance tonight," he says, and a chill runs through Elena. "I've got a fair bit of life experience, but I have to admit, I'm stumped here. What should I know about a decade dance?"

Elena takes a moment, then lifts her chin. "They tend to go badly for me," she says. "You know, sophomore year, I almost broke up with my boyfriend. In the fall, I almost died. Same old."

"Well, I suppose it's a good thing for all our sakes that you aren't going to tonight's," he says, and grins. "God knows what trouble you'd manage to get yourself in."

He leaves, then, for real, and Elena lets out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. She takes a long drink of her coffee, and looks over to where Katherine is seated – trapped – in a chair.

She doesn't know what to say. Part of her wants to ignore Katherine, ignore her and go about pretending she isn't even there, but for some reason she can't quite bring herself to – Katherine is _there_ , she's there and she can't hurt Elena, Elena has the upper hand for maybe the first time ever.

But on top of that, Katherine is there because she made a choice Elena could so easily have made. Elena can't quite imagine making it – she never considered running, not for one second – but it was an option. It's still an option, technically speaking, not that she has any interest in that course of action.

"So," says Katherine, and Elena supposes that's her decision made for her, then, "look at you, all cozied up to the big bad wolf. Figures."

Elena rolls her eyes. "Okay, Katherine," she says.

"No, I'm serious," Katherine says, leaning forward in her chair. "Do you feel warm inside when he complements you on being such a good little sacrifice? Do you preen under his praise? Do you feel special 'cause you're going to roll over and play dead when he asks you to?"

"No," Elena says.

"Do you think he likes you?" Katherine says.

Elena raises an eyebrow. "Likes me?"

Katherine scoffs. "I don't mean it like that, Elena, god, I'm not in middle school. Do you think he likes you? That he wishes he didn't need to kill you, because he's _fond_ of you? Is that why you're all giggles and wisecracks around him?"

Elena sighs. "What are you trying to get at, Katherine?" she asks.

Katherine shrugs. "I'm just saying. Klaus was awfully fond of me, when we first met and I was a sweet human girl. I lived at his house, he showered me in jewels and dresses and tokens of affection, courted me by the book. I thought he was planning to propose, honestly."

"You didn't know what he wanted with you," Elena says, defensive even though she has no reason to be. "I do."

"Because I warned you," Katherine says. "And instead of repaying the favor, you're all lined up to die and you got me kidnapped for good measure. Good going, Elena."

Elena raises an eyebrow. "I didn't get you kidnapped, Katherine. You betrayed him."

Katherine laughs, sounding disbelieving. "Betrayed him? God, you really are drinking the kool-aid. Can you hear yourself?"

 _Betrayed him_. It takes a minute, but Elena's own words ring in her mind like an alarm. "I didn't mean that," she says.

"Yes, you did," Katherine tells her. "You meant it, because you've been alone with Klaus for a month, and his magnanimous conviction that he's entitled to sacrificing the doppelganger is rubbing off on you."

"No, it's not," Elena says.

"Is it easier, thinking you're dying for a cause?" Katherine asks, her tone sugary sweet and a little nasal. "Deluding yourself into thinking you're being noble? Because you're not, you know. You're dying for nothing."

"I'm dying to save my family."

Katherine laughs. "Right, to save them from what happened to mine." There's something hard in Katherine's expression, in the gleam in her eye, the line of her jaw. "Do you know how he killed them?"

"I think I can imagine," Elena tells her.

"Think again," Katherine says. "He set it all up, you know, like some grand tableau. He was always theatrical." She lifts her chin. "My father was pinned to the wall with a sword, holding him so his feet danged and didn't touch the ground."

Elena closes her eyes.

"Of course, I didn't like my father very much, so he was propped up more for shock value than anything." Katherine sounds like she's trying to relish this, but there's an undertone to her voice that makes her sound like she's going to be sick. "Sort of like you and your father, actually. If he ever wanted revenge on you, do you think that's what he'd do with dear Uncle John? Impale him against your bedroom wall?"

"Stop it," Elena says. She turns away.

"My mother was the one I really loved," Katherine continues. "And Klaus knew that. She was laid out across my bed, the bed I'd given birth in. Klaus loves his symbolism, you know. I'm sure if he killed Jeremy, he'd find something just as poetic."

"Katherine, stop!"

Elena's voice rings in the apartment, even after she's spoken.

"You're not special, Elena," Katherine says, after a long time. "You're not the good one, you're not the smart one, you're not the noble one. You get choices because I gave them to you. You get Klaus's praise because I paved the way for you get in his good graces. You get to save your family because I learned how far Klaus would go the hard way."

"What do you want, a thank you?" Elena asks.

Katherine wrinkles her nose. "I don't want anything from you," she says. "I just wanted to clear things up."

Elena leaves the room and makes for the bathroom, not because she has to go, but because she needs a moment to herself. She stares at her face in the mirror, and wonders if in 500 years she would look the way Katherine does; she wonders if 500 years ago, Katherine looked like her.

She marches out of the bathroom, pours herself another cup of coffee, and asks, "Do you know anything about the original?"

"Um, the original what?" Katherine asks.

"Doppelganger," Elena says. "If I'm a doppelganger and you're a doppelganger, there has to have been an original, right?"

"I guess?" Katherine sounds as though she's annoyed by the very question.

"Do you know anything about her?" Elena asks.

Katherine snorts. "No, why would I?"

Elena looks back at her from over her shoulder. "Aren't you curious?" she asks.

Katherine sighs. "Not really?" she says. "She looked like me. She's probably dead. Why do I care?"

"Well, she started it all, didn't she?" Elena asks.

Katherine shoots a glare at her. "Klaus started it all," she tells her, in no uncertain terms. "Maybe Elijah, too. All the original one did was get herself killed."

"Maybe she volunteered," Elena suggests.

Katherine makes a face. "Then she was an idiot, and so are you."

. . .

Klaus comes back after school. "Man, what a day," he says. "I have to give your teacher here some credit. Two students cried to me. Two!"

"Did you terrorize them?" Elena asks.

Klaus rolls his eyes. "They were upset about grades Alaric had given them. Personally, I think he was easy on them. That girl, Dana? I'd have failed her for that whiny voice of hers months ago."

"Well, thank god you aren't a teacher, then," Elena comments.

Klaus grins at her. "I don't know, I've considered academia before. Elijah's always had a mild interest in guest lecturing at universities."

Elena blinks. "Really?" she asks.

"Oh, yes," Klaus says. "He's quite opinionated about, well, everything."

Elena shakes her head. "I can't imagine him having the patience for that. Or enough of an interest in human students."

"Well, that makes two of us, sweetheart. I doubt he'd ever go through with it." Klaus shrugs off Alaric's jacket. "Now," he says, "what on earth am I going to wear to this party tonight?"

He picks out something he deems sixties appropriate, all the while lobbing insults at Alaric's wardrobe, and then heads back out to the decade dance. Elena doesn't want to think about Klaus, at her school, around her classmates, around her friends, wearing the face of someone they all trust. It makes her sick to think about.

When he returns, his clothes are ripped and he's covered in blood.

"What happened to you?" she asks, rushing across the room to him.

"Went for a nightcap," Klaus says. "Wrong townie picked a fight."

Katherine snorts, still in her chair. "Never heard that one before," she comments. Elena looks back at her, then looks at Klaus and takes a step back.

"Tell me you didn't hurt anybody," she says.

Klaus grins at her. "I didn't hurt anybody," he says.

Elena shudders. "You're just saying that," she says, and his grin widens. "Klaus, please–"

"Do you want me to tell you?" Klaus asks. He sounds fed up, like he's snapped in an instant. "I don't think you do, sweetheart. None of your loved ones are dead, and I haven't broken your precious deal, so I don't see any reason to tell you anything."

He brushes past her toward Alaric's room, and a moment later, she hears him cursing Alaric's sense of fashion again.

She forces herself to believe him, about not killing any of her loved ones. She doesn't have any way of finding out otherwise, and there's nothing she can do. If something's happened to someone, she tells herself, she doesn't want to know. She's already made her bed, and now she has to lie in it. After all, even if he breaks their deal, she can't go back on her end of the bargain. It's too late.

Elena sleeps in Alaric's bedroom again that night. She spends most of the night staring up at the ceiling, Katherine's words running through her head, and when she finally nods off she has nightmares of Jeremy and John and Jenna's bodies, propped up around the house in a macabre scene of family. She wakes up in a cold sweat.

She takes a shower, helping herself to a disposable razor she finds in a package under the sink – she thinks they must belong to Jenna, since they're the brand Jenna always uses, and then she thinks of Jenna and her heart hurts. She's too distracted when she shaves, and manages to nick her right ankle twice. She sees the blood well against her skin, the cut too shallow to do anything but sting for a moment, and she imagines herself as she'll be tomorrow, drained of blood, veins rubbing against each other like sandpaper.

She knows that isn't how it works – and Klaus said drain to the point of her death, not drain of all blood – but the image sticks in her mind. It's hard to imagine there being anything left of her, with her blood gone; that's all she is, isn't it? Sacred blood and someone else's face.

Once she's dressed, and her hair is almost dry, she enters the living room, where Klaus is holding two coffees.

"Sweetheart," he says, and hands her a mug. "Just the way you like it."

"Thank you," she says, taking the proffered cup. She takes a long, slow sip, and warmth trickles down her throat and pools in her belly. She hadn't realized how hollow she felt until she put something in her stomach.

She makes herself a bowl of cereal, eats it while leaning against the counter. Whatever Klaus had been upset about the night before, he's cheerful as can be this morning, carrying on three quarters of the conversation, as he can be prone to do. Elena eats her breakfast and drinks her coffee and pretends to listen.

"Are you almost done, sweetheart?" he asks, and Elena blinks.

"Um, yeah, sure," she says. She puts her empty bowl in the sink, and nurses her mug for a few more moments. "Why?"

"I have a little excursion I'd like you to join me on," he tells her, walking up to stand in front of her. "It's a bit chilly today, though, so you might want a jacket."

"Okay," Elena says. She takes another swig of her coffee.

Klaus raises an eyebrow at her. "I don't have all the time in the world, love," he tells her.

"Neither do I," she retorts.

Klaus looks at her for a moment, then grins. It isn't a nice grin.

"You certainly don't," he tells her. There's something hungry in his eyes.

She swallows, feeling cold again, and drinks the last of her coffee before leaving it in the sink, too. She hurries back to the bedroom to throw on a cardigan.


	7. let us walk from fire unto fire

It's a terrible relief to leave the apartment – not just because she hates being cooped up like a caged animal, but because it's a breath of fresh air to leave Katherine behind, if only for a few hours. It's so strange to be out of the apartment with Klaus in Alaric's body, and she doesn't know what has happened that could make Klaus so comfortable having her out in Mystic Falls, but she doesn't question it. She wraps her cardigan tighter around herself, even though it's late April and there's not so much as a chill in the air.

Klaus drives her to the edge of the forest, and then parks the car, getting out and opening her door for her like a gentleman. She steps out, taking his offered hand as she rises to her feet, and looks around. "A stroll through the woods?" she asks.

Klaus grins at her. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," he quotes. There's a strange light in his eyes, and she knows he's waiting to see if she'll do what she knows he wants her to do.

"But I have promises to keep," she says, and his grin widens in delight. She shakes her head – of course she knows her Robert Frost. She wants to be a writer, after all; or at least she did, in another life.

Klaus traces a finger along the outline of her face, from her cheekbone to the tip of her jaw. She refuses to let herself shiver at the touch. "Not many miles until you sleep," he says.

She looks away.

"You seem rather unimpressed, sweetheart," he says.

She forces herself to meet his eyes again. "I just think, if we're reciting Frost, there are more fitting poems about trees and death," she tells him. She's not lying – it's just like Klaus to go for the most obvious quote, for the sake of dramatics.

Klaus raises one of Alaric's eyebrows. "Oh?" he asks. "Two roads diverged in a wood? Don't tell me you've fallen for the preaching of class valedictorians immemorial."

Elena presses her eyes shut, wills her memory to do right by her – it only has hours left to do so, after all. "One of my wishes," she recites, and in her mind she's twelve years old again standing in front of her English class, "is that those dark trees, so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, were not…" She swallows. She knows these words. "Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom, but stretched away unto the edge of doom."

She opens her eyes, tilts her head, and raises her eyebrows in a challenge.

Klaus laughs. "My, my, you do have a dark side, don't you?"

She smiles. "You've never met gloomy graveyard girl Elena," she responds. "I've got depths you've never seen."

Klaus shakes his head at her. "You certainly do, sweetheart," he says. "Ah, let's see." He begins to walk into the forest, and she keeps pace with him; he takes his time as he walks, like a man who has all the time in the world. "I should not be withheld, but that some day, into their vastness I should steal away." He has a quoting voice, she thinks; even in Alaric's body, his voice sounds more like Klaus's when he's reciting something. "Fearless," he continues, and grins at her as he pushes a stray branch out of their way, "of ever finding open land, or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand."

"I do not see why I should e'er turn back," she says, because she can do this, she can match an immortal word-for-word when it comes to literature. She has a mind like a steel trap, and once upon a time, she was a girl who lived and breathed for words. "Or those should not set forth upon my track to overtake me, who should miss me here." She swallows; she's reciting a poem she learned in middle school, she will not let herself get emotional about it. "And long to know if still I held them dear."

Klaus offers her a hand as they come to a stream. It's tiny – she could cross it in a big step without a problem – but she isn't going to rebuff him.

"They would not find me changed from him they knew," Klaus finishes, after a moment, "only more sure of all I thought was true."

They walk in silence for a few moments, further into the woods.

"So where are we headed?" she asks, when she can't stand it any longer. "I'm guessing you weren't just in the mood for a nice stroll."

"Right you are," Klaus tells her. "See, our lovely Katerina had a plan to try and bargain for her freedom. From what I understand, you coming to me ruined the part where she planned to hand you over, but she made do. I'll say this much about her: the girl is resourceful."

"What does that mean?" Elena asks. They come to a clearing in the woods, a clearing she recognizes too well.

They're right above the tomb.

"Do you remember what I told you was required for the sacrifice?" he asks.

Elena nods. "The doppelganger, the moonstone, a vampire, and a werewolf," she says.

"The straight-A student strikes again," Klaus says. "Yes, that's right. And though Katerina couldn't be responsible for bringing me the doppelganger, she made sure to have all the other ingredients waiting for me when I arrived. It won't buy her freedom, of course, but I appreciate the sentiment."

That Katherine had the moonstone was no surprise. That Katherine had procured a vampire and a werewolf to hand over to Klaus–

–any sympathy Elena felt for Katherine from the day before vanished, replaced by cold, dark hatred, and an inability to breathe.

"Does that mean something to you?" Klaus asks. She can tell in his voice that he knows it does.

She's braced for what she's about to see when they enter the tomb, but she can't hold back the gasp of horror when she sees Caroline and Tyler chained to the wall.

"No," she says. It sounds almost like a sob.

"Elena?" Caroline asks. She struggles against her restraints for a moment, and then her eyes travel up to Klaus's face, and she freezes. "Oh my god," she says.

"What?" Tyler asks.

Caroline swallows, lips trembling. "That's Klaus."

"Hello, sweetheart," Klaus says to her in Alaric's voice. "So you're the one Katerina chose." He takes a step towards her, and crouches down next to her. Caroline cringes, and leans as far away from him as she can, eyes squeezes shut. "I have to admit, I'm not surprised. She always did hate blondes."

"Klaus, you can't," Elena says. She knows better than to tell him what he can and can't do, and under normal circumstances she'd choose her words better, but her heart is racing and she knows he can hear and all of a sudden it strikes her that she put her faith in this deal, in Klaus, and it could have all been for nothing, she's going to die for _nothing_. "She's my best friend."

"I thought the witch was your best friend," Klaus comments, rising to his feet.

"I'm allowed more than one," Elena says. "Klaus, _please_ , you promised the people I love would be safe, they're both on that list, Klaus, _please_ –"

"So you expect me to find another vampire and another werewolf at a moment's notice?" Klaus asks. "That's a tall order, love."

"We both know you have a backup," Elena says through gritted teeth. "Klaus, please. I surrendered, I turned myself over, and you–"

"Ah, yes, your martyr complex," Klaus says. He comes over to her, brushes a strand of hair out of her face, and just like that, Elena can breathe again. She knows he'll let them live, now; she doesn't know how, but she does. "There's a symmetry to it, though, don't you think? Three childhood friends. It's poetic."

"I'm sure you can find a way to make it poetic no matter what," she replies.

Klaus grins at her. "Flattery, sweetheart, will get you everywhere," he says. "Very well. Your little friends will be safe."

Elena breaks from his side the second the words are out of his mouth and runs to Caroline, kneeling next to her. She wraps an arm around Caroline, holds Caroline's head to her chest, strokes her hair. "Care, I'm so sorry," she says. "You're – you're going to be fine, I'm so sorry." She looks over at Tyler, whose eyes are wide. "You're both okay," she says, more to herself than to them.

"Is that all?" Klaus asks.

Elena looks up at him, and knows what she has to say. "Thank you," she tells him, even though she shouldn't have to thank him for this, for not going back on his word.

"You're more than welcome," Klaus says. "I'll have them taken to a safe location until after the sacrifice."

"What?" Elena asks.

Klaus smiles. "Your friend here is a werewolf, sweetheart, and it's a full moon tomorrow night. Now, you know me, I'm all for wreaking havoc and murdering innocents, but considering the circumstances I'd like to make sure he can't cause any chaos that would interfere with my evening plans."

Elena keeps her eyes locked on his.

Klaus sighs. "And, of course, he'll be free to go as soon as I've broken the curse. I'll personally ensure it."

Elena nods, and looks back at Caroline.

"Elena," Caroline says, and bites her lip. There are a thousand words in the trembling of her voice.

Elena strokes her hair. "I love you," she says. "Let me do this for you."

"This is all very touching, but I'm afraid you and I have more business to attend to," Klaus says. "In fact, I have a gift for you."

"A gift?" Elena asks.

"Of course," he says, with a grin. "It's the second to last day of your life, Elena, and I now find myself feeling very generous."

Elena swallows. She presses a kiss to Caroline's hair, holding her as well as she can around the chains, and then stands. She makes her way to Tyler, and kneels next to him, unsure of what to say.

"Take care of yourself," she says. "I'm so sorry. For everything."

"Elena–" Tyler says, but Elena shushes him and gives him a hug. After a moment, she feels Tyler's hand press against her back.

It's not much of a goodbye, but she didn't think she'd get one at all.

. . .

Next, he takes her to her school.

"Why are we here?" she asks, as soon as she realizes he's pulling into the parking lot. She doesn't want to see her school. She doesn't want to see another reminder of the life she's about to lose.

Klaus just smiles at her. "You'll see," he says.

She follows him down the hallways to Alaric's classroom – she doesn't know _why_ he's taking her to Alaric's classroom, but she expects it's for something awful. She doesn't expect, when he pushes open to door, to hear Jeremy shouting "Hey! Let me out of here!"

"Jer?" she asks, and rushes past Klaus to enter the room.

"I told you I had a gift for you," Klaus says, when she turns back to look at him. "I don't think I could stomach a full goodbye tour, and, knowing you, by the time that was over the full moon would have come and gone, but I made an educated guess and figured you'd want to see your brother most of all."

She sprints the few feet that separate her from Jeremy and throws herself at him, wrapping her arms around him as tight as she can. God, it's him, she can feel him and he's real, she can smell him and it's Jeremy, it's her brother at last.

"Elena?" Jeremy says, as though he can't believe she's real either.

"Jer," she says, and pulls away so she can look at his face, can press her hands to his cheeks. "Jeremy, oh my god."

"Elena, what's going on?" he asks, his eyes searching hers. "Why are you – why are we here?"

She blinks very quickly, determined not to cry, because if she starts crying she won't stop. "To say goodbye," she tells him, her voice as gentle as she can make it.

"No," says Jeremy. He pulls away from her – he still has his hands around her back, but his face is no longer between her palms. "No–"

"Don't do this, Jeremy," she says. "There's nothing you can do. Don't ruin this, okay?"

"Elena, I can't let you _die_ –"

"Yes, you can," Elena says, nodding. "You have to, Jer. I've been marked for death since before I was born, and you – if you try to stop it, the only thing you'll do is get yourself killed. Don't try to save me – I don't want to be saved. There's nothing you can do."

Jeremy looks at her for a moment, eyes wide, and then shakes his head. "You say that like I don't have a choice."

"You don't have a choice," she says. Her voice hitches in her throat a little, but she manages to smile up at him. She sees a tear at the corner of his eye, and brushes her thumb along the bridge of his nose to wipe it away. "But I do, and I'm choosing to save you. Please let me make it, okay? Please, respect that. Let me have that much."

Jeremy doesn't offer a positive response, or a negative response; he just stares at her a moment longer, and then wraps her in a hug so tight it hurts. She clutches back just as hard.

"I love you," she whispers. She has her eyes pressed shut so she doesn't cry.

"I love you," Jeremy whispers back.

. . .

"I'm so ready," Klaus says, that night, when they're back at the apartment, "to get out of this bad hairdo."

"You're the one who decided to take over Alaric's body," Elena reminds him. Katherine glares from the sofa she's sitting on, swigging bourbon straight from the bottle.

"And I'm glad I did," he replies. "It's been fun. But I'm getting antsy, now."

"Well, I'm not going to complain," she says. "Where's your body?"

Klaus smiles at her. "Maddox is bringing it over as we speak. Along with some… companions, of mine."

"More witches?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. "For the ritual, I mean."

"That would be correct," he says. He takes a step towards her. "Oh, don't look so wary, sweetheart. They're all dying to meet you."

"I think I'm the one dying to meet them," she says, and Klaus barks a laugh.

A few minutes later, they all arrive, Maddox leading the group through the door.

"Greta," Klaus says to one witch, a girl with heavy eyeliner, smaller than Elena. He sounds pleased to see her.

"Hello, love," Greta returns, smiling. Elena chooses to believe that she picked up the verbal tick from Klaus. "Nice body. Ready to get out of it?"

Klaus groans, and Greta grins.

"Where is your body, anyway?" Elena says, interrupting, stepping forward. "Because if you tell me it's being kept in a coffin, I might cry."

Klaus laughs. "Greta," he says, in that magnanimous voice he's too fond of resorting to, "allow me to introduce my doppelganger, Elena. Much prettier than Katerina, don't you think?"

Greta looks at her like she's a science experiment, but smiles all the same, and then her eyes travel to a point behind Elena, where Katherine is seated. "Neither is my type," she allows.

Elena hears the sound of something rolling, and looks to the door, where a massive, ornate chest is being wheeled in. "Is that it?" she asks.

Klaus grins at it. "Yes, it is," he says. He wraps one of Alaric's arms around Elena's waist, and presses a kiss to her hair. "Now, if you don't mind, sweetheart, I'm going to ask you to back out of the way. Can't have you too near the ritual, after all. There are candles involved. Could be dangerous.

"Sounds like a fire hazard." Elena steps back, out of Klaus's grip, and he lets her. She backs up all the way to the kitchen counter, and watches the ritual unfold.

There are candles, a whole semi-circle of them, and the chest is turned and propped up vertically. The witches kneel, chanting, and while Elena stays far out of the way, Katherine rises, walking so that she's facing the chest, standing just feet away from the witches. For a moment, Elena is worried that Katherine's planning to interfere with the spell, but she just stands there, as though transfixed.

Klaus stands Alaric's body next to the chest, but then when the flames on the candles flare up, Alaric's body seizes and shudders, and he looks at Katherine with an expression that does not belong to Klaus. "Elena?" he asks, and then his eyes travel to Elena, and he looks between them again before crumbling to the ground.

Maddox stands, walks to the chest, pulls open the door, and there he is.

Elena goes still with relief. In front of her, she sees Katherine go still with fear.

Klaus is in a white dress shirt – of course he dressed up for the occasion. "Now that's more like it," he says, stepping out of the chest. Katherine backs up, and Elena can't blame her – Klaus is a lot more impressive in his real body, and if Katherine was that scared of him when he controlled Alaric, she can't imagine how Katherine feels seeing him in the flesh.

Klaus sidesteps the candles, and makes a beeline for Elena. "You look pleased," he notes with a grin. "Did you miss my true face, sweetheart?"

"Desperately," Elena deadpans.

Klaus laughs – god, she can't believe it, but it's a relief to hear Klaus's laugh in his own voice. He looks to Katherine, then. "Katerina," he says, and Katherine looks terrified by the sound of her name. "You've been a terrible house guest, but still, it has been fun. That being the case, I'm afraid your presence has lost its entertainment value."

Katherine's face is very still. "If you're going to kill me, just do it," she says.

"Oh, but why would I do that?" he says. "I've been cursed for five hundred years because of your insolence. My revenge is going to last at least half that long." In the blink of an eye, he's behind Katherine, stabbing her neck with a needle. Katherine gasps, and then her eyes roll back into her head and she collapses.

"I thought Katherine was immune to vervain," Elena says, trying to conceal how shaken she is.

Klaus smiles. "She might be resistant," he says, "but not to a dose that strong, or that concentrated." He nods at his witches, and they collect Katherine's prone body, and carry her out the door as Elena watches.

"Where are they taking her?" Elena asks. She steps in the direction of the door, but Klaus blocks her with his body.

"We'll go pay her a visit soon enough," he tells her, his voice little more than a murmur. "No use being there for the grunt work, though. I think I'd like a drink first."

He walks to the liquor cabinet. "I will say, this teacher of yours has quite the taste in liquor. This is a fine bourbon collection." He picks up a bottle, looks at it, and then makes his way to the kitchen and procures two glasses. "Neat or on the rocks?"

"Neat," Elena says, a little bit in shock. "Alaric's still on the floor."

"Yes, well, he'll be out of it for at least twelve solid hours, and then I've got plans for him." He brings her drink over to her, and laughs at the look in her eyes. "No, I'm not going to harm him, sweetheart. I do believe I've proven my intention to keep my word on that matter. Stop worrying"

"I've got less than twenty-four hours left to worry," she tells him, and takes her drink. "I'm working overtime."

He laughs at that, and she drains her glass on one go. He raises an eyebrow. "Thirsty, much?" he asks. His tone is joking, but there's something darker in his eyes.

"Parched," she replies, throat still burning. She stares into the bottom of her glass.

Klaus observes her in silence for a moment – she can see that he's watching her out of her peripheral vision, but she doesn't meet his gaze. After a while, he says, "it isn't going to hurt, you know."

She looks up, and finds that when she meets his eyes, she can't look away.

"I've got quite a lot of experience at this, Elena," he tells her. She'd think it was a joke, but his voice, his face, are all entirely serious. "It won't hurt at all. I'll make certain of it."

She doesn't know what to make of this, of the predator comforting his prey. None of the fairytales ever prepared her for this.

She doesn't respond, just nods at him. He holds her gaze a moment longer, then pours her another glass of bourbon.

Once they've finished their drinks, Klaus drives her back out to the edge of the woods, and they walk through the forest, back towards the tomb.

"Why are we here again?" she asks, sidestepping a rock. "You said you were keeping Tyler and Caroline until after the full moon."

"I am," he says, "but they're not here anymore. I did tell you they'd be taken to a safe location, didn't I?"

"Is the tomb not a safe location?" she asks.

She looks up at him, and sees, by the sliver of moonlight hitting his face, that he's grinning.

"Not anymore," he says.

Elena swallows. "You put Katherine in the tomb," she says. It isn't a question. "That's… that's poetic, I guess."

"Thank you, sweetheart," Klaus says, and offers her a hand as she almost trips on a tree stump.

"I still don't understand why you're bringing me to see her," Elena continues. "I mean, you could have just told me where she was when I asked."

"Ah, but this isn't just my revenge," he tells her. She pauses, and looks up at him. "Katerina not only intended to hand you over to me to barter for her freedom, but chose two of the people you care most for, just to spite you." He looks at her, something serious in his gaze. "Don't you think you deserve retribution for that?"

"Tyler and Caroline are going to be fine, though," she says. "And if I hadn't turned myself over, you'd have been glad of Katherine doing it, so why are rushing to my defense? The result's the same either way."

"Principle of the matter, sweetheart," Klaus tells her, with a smile. "After all, you handed yourself over to me. I'm very grateful for that, you know. You did right by me, so I intend to do right by you."

"How chivalrous," Elena says, her voice little more than a murmur.

"Of course," Klaus says. "Never let it be said that I'm not a gentleman."

He leads her down the stairs to the tomb, holding her hand so she doesn't fall and hurt herself, and then he pushes aside the stone covering the tomb entrance, and there's Katherine.

Elena can't help but have déja vu.

Katherine didn't look as scared last time, though, or as vulnerable, even though she'd been desiccating for weeks. Now, she looks more helpless than Elena's ever seen her, and Elena can't tear her eyes away.

"The first part of Katerina's punishment is in your honor, sweetheart," Klaus says to her. "Letting her rot in here for a while ought to teach her a lesson.

"But–" Elena cuts herself off – she doesn't want to encourage this, she despises Katherine but she knows Klaus well enough by now to know that his idea of justice, whatever that may be, is too awful to contemplate – but it's clear Klaus has already caught her meaning.

"But she might escape?" Klaus finishes. "Yes, you're right, sweetheart, she very well might. In fact, I'm rather hoping she does, one of these days – if she desiccates too long, she'll stop hurting, and that wouldn't be any fun, would it?

He leans forward, toward Katherine, who's trembling. "Still, I'll need precautions, if you do escape. Can't have you on the other side of the planet when I come looking. Perhaps I'll –" he pauses, and tilts his head, like he's observing an caged animal in a zoo. "But no, it's no fun chasing a rabbit who has nowhere to run, is it? If I leave you in Mystic Falls, you'll just be a sitting duck. I do need to give you a sporting chance, don't I? I'm not a complete monster."

Katherine shudders at the words. Elena's stomach is churning.

He pauses, thinks for a moment, and then grins. "When you first came to Mystic Falls, you positioned yourself alongside Confederate soldiers, didn't you?" he asks, and wrinkles his nose. "I never did like American slavers. It is poetic, though." He leans further forward, and Elena knows he's using compulsion. "If you escape this tomb," he tells her, "you cannot leave the boundaries of the former Confederacy."

Katherine blinks.

"Do you understand?" he asks.

"I understand," Katherine says, like she's in a trance.

Klaus stands, smiling.

"You do make a lovely Southern Belle, Katerina," he tells her. "I look forward to seeing what you make of yourself next."

That night, Elena cannot sleep. The image of own self, trapped and afraid and damned to centuries of torment, haunts her every time she closes her eyes.


	8. unable are the loved to die

When Elena gets out of bed on the morning of the last day of her life, Klaus is nowhere to be found. There's no note anywhere hinting to his whereabouts – not that she expected there to be – but it leaves her heart racing anyway, knowing he's in all likelihood off making preparations to kill her.

It isn't that she wants to die, but there's a big part of her that's just apathetic to the whole thing, dying, being dead and gone. She doesn't want to die, but she doesn't mind dying. That's the difference between her and Katherine, she thinks, the reason she doesn't hate Klaus for what he's going to do to her, even though he should; in some ways, she feels like he's just finishing what was supposed to happen a year ago when she went off that bridge. She's been living on borrowed time, and it had to run out sooner or later.

Elena hears a knock on the door, and walks over to it, curious. She can't reach out to the door handle; she doesn't know if the place is spelled or if she's been compelled not to. She doesn't want to call out, since she doesn't know who it is.

A moment later, the door handle turns, and the door's pushed open from the outside to reveal Alaric.

"Ric?" she asks. It's weird, looking at him and knowing he's _him_ , now. "Ric, what are you doing here? Klaus could–"

"Klaus isn't here," Alaric answers with a crooked smile. "Damon's distracting him."

Elena swallows. "Oh, god," she says.

Alaric raises an eyebrow. "Hopefully he won't get himself killed," he says. "But either way, I'm only here to invite him inside."

At the word _him_ , Elijah steps out from behind the door, and Elena's breath hitches in her throat.

This means Elijah's been working with her friends, she thinks, and if he's been working with her friends that means her friends are working on something. She's suspected as much the whole time, but now she _knows_ , and it terrifies her. They can't work on anything. She doesn't want to be saved, and if they try to save her they'll wind up dead, dead, dead, dead like Katherine's family, positioned like one of Klaus's beloved artworks.

Klaus doesn't trust Elijah, especially not around her, and he might be right. Her friends shouldn't trust him. He might be here to kill her, to make sure the sacrifice can't be carried out, and no one would be able to stop him.

"Hello, Elena," he says, the image of politeness. He's in a black suit today. He looks over at Alaric and raises an eyebrow. "If you don't mind?"

Alaric glares at him. "I don't like this," he says.

"I assure you, Mr. Saltzman, once the ritual is complete I have no interest in setting foot in this miserable little town of yours again," he says.

Alaric sighs. "Elijah, would you like to come in?"

"I very much would," Elijah says, and steps past the threshold of the apartment. Elena steps back.

"Alaric, please don't tell me you're planning some sort of rescue," she says. "You'll just get yourself killed–"

"Just listen to what Elijah has to say, Elena," Alaric says, and then he leaves.

Elena swallows. "Since when are you working with my friends?" she asks.

"Since our interests have found themselves aligned," Elijah says, stepping further into the room. He puts a box of some sort down on the cabinet, runs his finger along the dining room table, picks up a book and flips through the pages for a moment, seeming at perfect ease.

"And what are those interests?" Elena asks.

Elijah looks back at her. "I'm afraid it wouldn't be safe for you to know, Elena."

"It wouldn't be safe for me, or it wouldn't be safe for you?" Elena asks, raising an eyebrow. "I've got about twelve hours to live, Elijah. I don't think my safety can be jeopardized more than that."

Elijah wags a finger at her. "See, that happens to be what I came here to discuss," he tells her.

"My impending death?" Elena asks.

"Not exactly," Elijah says, a smile playing at the edge of his lips. "You will die tonight, of this there is no question. Whether that death will be permanent is another matter entirely."

Elena's vision swims. "What?" she asks.

"It's no certain thing," Elijah continues, having seemingly not noticed Elena's lack of breathing, of balance. "However, there may be a way to ensure that you return to the realm of the living after the ritual."

Elena swallows. "You mean vampirism," she says.

Elijah smiles, and shakes his head. "That wouldn't be a return to the living, now, would it?" he asks. "Allow me to make myself clear. There may be a way for you to return from the dead with your humanity intact." He turns toward her, eyebrows raised. "You do want to live, don't you?"

Elena stares at him, wide-eyed. She thinks the question was meant to be rhetorical, but it doesn't feel that way to her; it feels like a punch in the gut. She wants to fall asleep under the stars tonight and never wake up, for the knowledge that she's saved the people she loves to be the last thing she ever knows. She wants to stop fighting.

But she also wants to live. She wants to see Jeremy, watch him get older. She wants to graduate high school. She wants to hold Stefan again, have sleepovers with Caroline and Bonnie, see if Matt and Tyler can bring the football team to state in their senior year, be there when Jenna finally meets the right guy, or, better yet, be able to say she called it when Alaric proposes.

She wants a life, a human life.

She nods. "Yes," she says, and her voice comes out in a scratchy whisper. "Yes, god, yes."

She thinks she means it.

Elijah's gaze is wary, perhaps concerned, but he nods. "I assumed so," he says. He returns to the counter, to the little box (it's more like a chest, she thinks, ornate and ancient-looking), and flips open the lid, then pulls out a strange container.

It looks like a bottle of perfume, Elena thinks, the old, fancy kind that her grandmother used to use, except the glass looks like it's been accumulating dust for years.

"How old is that?" she asks.

"I acquired it some five hundred years ago," Elijah responds.

Elena takes a breath. "For Katherine," she says. "Will it still work?"

"I don't know," Elijah tells her. There's an honesty to his voice that takes her by surprised. "It may fail, and leave you dead. But the magic of witches is rarely constrained by the limits of time. The spell Niklaus is cursed with has lasted a thousand years; I don't find it hard to believe that an elixir of resuscitation might last at least half that long."

Elena stares at the bottle, imagines medieval witches brewing it centuries ago, intended for a different girl.

Katherine found her own way to cheat death. Maybe Elena has a right to one too. And if it fails, well, she's gotten lucky once, and gotten an entire year she wasn't supposed to have. That can be enough.

"I do not have all day, Elena," Elijah says.

Elena takes the bottle, unscrews the cap, and looks at the liquid. It's amber; it looks almost like scotch, but it's lighter, she thinks, less substantial. It looks like it could be magical.

She brings the bottle to her lips, throws her head back, and drains it.

It tastes like nothing; she can feel it running down her throat, but it tastes like _nothing_ , and not the way water tastes like nothing. It's like drinking liquid mountain air, she thinks, like drinking pure light that's somehow been captured in a bottle. She can taste the magic.

Elijah takes back the bottle, a strange look in his eyes.

"Thank you," she says.

Elijah inclines his head. "If all goes well, perhaps I'll see you again," he says. "If it does not… well. I'm glad I was able to have met you."

It's a strange farewell, but Elijah is gone before she has the chance to comment. All the better; she wouldn't say it back to him.

She spends the rest of the day trying to distract herself from what she knows is to come; there's nothing to do, though, she can't concentrate enough to read any of Alaric's books, she can't will herself to sleep, she's not hungry. She breaks into Alaric's bourbon and pours herself one, two, three glasses as she waits. It burns her throat; she wishes it could burn away her brain, burn away her insides so that they stop churning, so that she can be blank and empty without a single thought in her head, let alone the dozens bouncing around in her skull. It's claustrophobic.

Klaus comes back that early that evening, but he doesn't come alone. A procession of caterers follows him, setting up food on the dining room table. Elena shoots Klaus a questioning look, hoping her heart isn't pounding too loudly, hoping he won't trick her into admitting that Elijah visited today.

"The last supper," Klaus tells her, with a grin. "I thought it fitting."

It does all smell delicious, but Elena isn't hungry in the slightest. She eats anyway, knowing Klaus will take offense if she doesn't, and tries to find it in herself to enjoy the food, the wine.

This might not be her last meal, she thinks, and forces the thought from her mind, afraid that Klaus will notice her heart speeding up.

"I met the other Salvatore brother today," Klaus tells her, and she has to try not to choke on her wine. "I didn't realize the both of them were in love with you."

"Damon's not–" she starts to say.

Klaus laughs. "Of course he is, sweetheart. He's mad for you. It's rather pathetic, really." He doesn't sound as amused as she thinks he wants to; he sounds a little angry, if anything.

Elena doesn't respond to his words. She doesn't want to admit that she knows he's right about Damon.

Something occurs to her, then, and she lifts her chin. "I'd like to make a request," she says, keeping her voice still.

Klaus looks surprised, but pleased. "Yes, love?"

"I want to make sure my family gets my body," she says. If she's going to come back to life, she should be with them. If she isn't… "I want to make sure they can bury me, have a proper funeral. I know that will mean something to them."

"Hmm," Klaus says, and takes a sip of wine. "I have to say, love, that's far more reasonable of a request than I was expecting." He looks pensive, then. "I'll have to keep your body for the remainder of the night, to ensure no one gets their hands on you while the magic from the ritual is still coursing through you, but then, yes, I'll deliver you to your family. I'm not sure they'll view it as an act of kindness, though."

"Tell them I asked you too," Elena says. "Tell them it was my last wish. Please."

Klaus raises an eyebrow at her. "I already said yes, sweetheart. There's no need to beg, much as I enjoy groveling."

"Thank you," she responds, and returns her attention to her food. She doesn't eat, though; she pushes her pasta around the plate, feeling disinterested and disconnected from the world.

"Is something bothering you, sweetheart?" Klaus asks.

Elena swallows. "What time is the sacrifice?" she asks. It's hard to get the words out; they taste like ash in her throat.

"We've got another hour or so before we're heading out," Klaus says. "Then we'll set everything up, put the others in their places."

Elena takes a breath. "You have the moonstone?"

"Got it when I captured Katerina," Klaus tells her. He leans forward. "You're not getting cold feet, are you?" he asks. "You know it won't make any difference if you are."

"I'm not," Elena tells him. "I'm just… restless, I guess."

"As am I," Klaus tells her, sitting back in his chair. "I've been waiting to break this curse for a millennium, but these last few hours feel longer than all of that time put together."

"Somehow I doubt that," Elena tells him, and he grins.

"Perhaps I'm exaggerating a little," he says.

. . .

When the time for the sacrifice comes – as it was always, inevitably going to – Elena stands at Klaus's side, on his stone altar, his hand at the curve of her hip, watching the others being led to the slaughter.

It's a cold spring night, but Elena feels hot all over, flushed under the weight of the leather jacket she has on. Klaus's hand is pressed against the sliver of bare skin exposed by her low-rise jeans, and his hands seem to burn against her flesh, and there's something dark and warm in his chest that she can just _feel_ against her back in every breath he takes.

One of Klaus's witches – Greta, Elena recognizes her later than she usually would have, her eyes still unaccustomed to the dark – leads in a female werewolf Elena doesn't recognize. She's screaming, moaning in pain, clutching at her stomach, and it's painful just to look at her. Elena feels sick – she'd wanted Klaus to choose strangers, to not hurt her friends, but this woman she doesn't know has nothing to do with anything and is going to die for it anyway. A circle of flames rises around where she lies, writhing, on the ground.

It could have been Tyler, Elena thinks, Tyler, moaning and screaming, caged like a wild dog but by fire rather than iron, laid out for the slaughter, in too much pain to even fight.

"What's happening to her?" Elena asks.

"Greta spelled her to slow her transition," Klaus answers, sounding delighted. "Her body is ripping itself apart from the inside."

Elena wants to scream. She might have to die, but she knows she won't have to suffer, she's been promised that she won't have to suffer. She didn't realize any of the others would.

Klaus pulls her closer, so his mouth is just behind her ear. "Isn't it glorious?" he asks. "Three goddesses, offered up at the altar of nature?"

"The vampire's a woman, too?" she asks, clinging on to the facts, whatever she can, to stay indifferent.

There's something so Klaus about choosing all women. It's creepy and archaic and makes her feel like a piece of meat – just like him.

"Oh, yes." Klaus's smile is clear in his voice. "This one's special for you, sweetheart. Another gift." He lifts his head, and raises his voice. "Bring her in!"

A witch leads in a woman, small and dark-haired and struggling against the magic holding her in its grip. The witch casts the woman down, raises a circle of flame around her just like the other, and the woman looks up, straight at Elena.

It's Isobel.

Elena's breath catches in her throat, and she backs up into Klaus without even meaning to. Her heart is hammering against her ribcage.

"Your mother," says Klaus, as though presenting a gift he's especially proud of. "You told me she was cruel to you, that she conspired to hurt you. I thought it fitting."

Klaus was going to murder her mother in some twisted attempt to reward her. Klaus was going to kill Isobel.

"Elena," calls Isobel, and Elena shrinks back into Klaus's hold. "Elena, please don't let him do this." Isobel sounds as detached as ever; Elena doesn't think she even has it in her to be properly scared.

Elena, on the other hand, is terrified where she'd been almost at peace before; all of a sudden, she can't wait for the sacrifice to start, because the sooner it starts the sooner Isobel won't have any lies left to spew at her.

"I'm your mother, Elena," Isobel says, and Elena flinches. "I love you."

Even begging for her life, Isobel can't say the words like she means them.

Elena swallows. "I can't listen to this," she says, and turns her head away. She's not quite burying her face in Klaus's chest, but it's close. She knows she can't hide from Isobel's gaze, knows Isobel can see Elena even if Elena can't see her, but she pretends it makes a difference.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," he says. "You'll get to watch her die before the night is out."

Elena thinks that Klaus truly believes he's giving her a gift; this is his way of showing affection.

"It's time," says Greta, a hint of impatience in her voice, and Klaus steps back from Elena.

"Forgive me, love," he says, "but I can't keep watch on you all night, and I can't risk your little friends spiriting you away."

The witch makes a beckoning motion; Elena shoots one glance back at Klaus, then sets her shoulders and follows her out into the clearing. She doesn't so much as blink when the circle of flame rises around her.

Klaus kills the werewolf first, ripping her heart out of her chest without breaking a sweat. The woman was in too much pain to even fight him; watching Klaus kill her is more like watching a vet put down a suffering animal than watching a monster commit an atrocity. Elena keeps her eyes trained on him the whole time, and while he squeezes blood out of the wolf's heart, he shoots her a grin.

Isobel's turn comes next. She tries to run, but Klaus pins her to the ground as though it takes no effort at all. Elena sits, stone-faced and looking away, as Isobel begs and pleads and bargains for her life, says anything she can to try and make Klaus put down the stake in his hands. Elena remembers the look in Isobel's eyes the first time they officially met, and her chest tightens.

"Look at you, Elena" says Isobel, in that awful, inhuman voice. "You can't even watch me die, can you?"

Elena back straightens, and she turns to look at Isobel. She stands, walks as close to the edge of the flames as she can without burning herself, only feet away from where Klaus has Isobel pinned down.

"If you want me to care, turn it on," says Elena, voice only trembling a little. "While you still can."

Isobel looks at her, an alien smile playing at the corners of her lips. "Turn it on?" she asks. "What, for you?" She laughs, and the sound is awful and tears prick at the corners of Elena's eyes. "I tried to make a deal with Klaus, you know. Katherine and I teamed up to hand you over in exchange for her freedom. Your father asked me for my help, believed I'd actually raise a finger to save you."

"Stop talking," Elena says, voice shaking.

Isobel raises an eyebrow. "Oh, did I hurt your feelings?" she asks. "Do you still want me to care, after everything?" Her laugh is like nails on a chalkboard, and Elena's head is burning. "Look at yourself, Elena. You're pathetic–"

Klaus jams the stake into Isobel's heart, and Elena lets out a little gasp as she watches her mother die, blue veins crawling up her skin.

She sits on the grass as Klaus removes Isobel's heart, and drains it over the same basin he drained the werewolf's blood into. _Isobel's blood is going to break Klaus's curse_ , she thinks, for the first time. _Just like mine._

There's a part of her that's angry about that, angry even though she shouldn't be, furious that Isobel's even tainting this. When she first met Isobel, she desperately wanted to find something they had in common; this is the last thing she wants to share with her mother.

There's a lot of chanting, then, and it sounds like Latin to Elena – not that she would have any way of telling that, other than recognizing that it sounds like one of Bonnie's spells – god, Bonnie, she hopes Bonnie's okay, she hopes Bonnie isn't thinking of trying anything tonight. It would be just like Bonnie to show up guns blazing to save Elena – Bonnie's the hero, Bonnie's the brave one, Bonnie shouldn't waste all that she is and all that she could be on Elena.

Elena's turn is next. She knows this, but it drags on and on and she's so _sick_ of waiting, so ready for this to be up and finished. It seems to be forever until the moon is high enough in the sky, forever until the time comes for her to die.

She knows the elixir is still in her veins, knows it just might work, knows it might not be the end.

Part of her still wants it to be.

The flames die down in the space of a second, and Klaus walks up to where she's sitting. There are bloodstains on his hands, at the cuffs of his sleeves.

 _He's about to kill me_ , she thinks. The thought resonates dully in her mind; she can't even bring herself to think of it as momentous.

She places her hand in his outstretched one, and lets him lead her like a lamb to the slaughter.

He turns to face her at the altar and brushes her hair behind her ears, cupping the base of her head in his hand so her face is tilted up toward him. "It's a pity you wear the face you do, love," he tells her, voice soft, and a little wistful. "I might have let you live, otherwise."

"You'd have killed me the day you met me, otherwise," she returns, her tone gentle, and Klaus laughs.

"There is that," he admits, and twirls a strand of her hair around his finger. "Still. Here ends the Petrova legacy."

Her heart is not pounding as loudly as it should be, standing under the hand of her killer.

"I suppose the symmetry of it all deserves respect, though," he continues, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. "Elena. It's derived from Greek, you know, from Helen. Do you know the story of Helen, Elena?"

"Helen of Troy?" she asks, voice little more than a murmer.

Klaus's thumb travels up and down the side of her neck. "The face that launched a thousand ships," he says, and she swallows. He has to notice; his hand is on her throat, after all. "And doomed a thousand men, of course. Still. It's fitting. Elena."

His hand travels along her neck until his fingers are right under her chin, and his thumb just under her mouth. "Thank you, Elena," he says, and then he brushes a kiss against her lips, feather-light, so gentle that if she closes her eyes she could mistake it for a breeze.

Then he bends down to her neck, the hand cradling her head tilting it to expose more skin, and bites into her throat.

It hurts for a moment, but it's not a harsh pain, and though she can feel him taking in deep gulps of her blood there's a finesse to his technique that means there's no messy, haphazard tearing, just a faint pulling sensation. She feels drowsy, and her knees tremble for a moment; his hand wraps around her lower back, seizing her against him and holding her in place. In the distance, over his shoulder, the flames seem brighter than ever, dancing up towards the sky as though they're trying to make up for the starless night above. She blinks, and her eyelids are heavy when she opens her eyes again, and her breaths are short and light. A moment later, she closes her eyes, and does not open them again.

The dark abyss behind her eyes consumes her, death emerging from the wings and swallowing her whole, as though it's been lying it wait in the periphery of her vision forever.

 _I know this feeling_ , Elena Gilbert thinks, and dies.


	9. in that sleep of death

If this is death, Elena Gilbert thinks, it's far, far too bright for her liking.

She wants to keep her eyes closed. She wants to stay in the darkness until her mind surrenders to oblivion, but whatever that light is from, it's brilliant and bright and shines through her shut eyelids.

Maybe she's alive. Maybe there's nothing in death, and she's alive, and it's morning. She doesn't want to wake up, but if her family is standing over her waiting, she owes it to them to open her eyes.

She does, and sees her own face.

"Katherine?" she asks, but it's not, she knows it's not, Katherine's hair isn't that long and she would never wear it in heavy braids like this girl, nor would she wear a blue woollen dress, and–

The girl smiles, more gently than Katherine would ever be capable of. "Not exactly."

Elena's jaw drops. "You're the original," she says, and she knows the words are true the moment she says them.

The girl doesn't answer, just smiles.

"I'm sorry," Elena says. "I don't… I don't know your name."

"Tatia," says the girl. "My name is Tatia."

Elena stares at the girl's face a moment longer, than tears her gaze away to look around. They're in the woods of Mystic Falls, she's sure of it, except they're not; everything looks hazy, not quite real, like she has her eyes open underwater. "Where are we?" she asks.

"Some call this the other side," Tatia tells her.

"The other side of what?" Elena asks, and then she realizes and inhales sharply. "Of life," she says. "So we're… is this the afterlife?"

"I suppose one could refer to it as such," Tatia says. A smile plays at the edge of her lips; she looks sad. "Suffice to say, we can see the living, but they cannot see us. We walk alongside them, invisible to all but a few."

Elena sits upright as fast as she can. "Wait, there are others here?" She swallows, scarcely daring to believe it. "Are…"

Tatia's gaze falls, and Elena knows the answer before she says it, and she feels like there's a lead brick in her chest even though she knows so much better than to hope. "There are no humans, here," Tatia says. "I'm sorry, Elena, but your parents are someplace else. At peace, perhaps. This realm holds only the supernatural."

Elena narrows her eyes. "Aren't you human?" she asks.

"We're doppelgangers," Tatia says.

Elena swallows. "That doesn't seem fair," she says.

Tatia laughs. "Little is," she says. Her voice is so kind; Elena's heard her own voice out of someone else's mouth before, but she's never heard it sound gentle and sweet, never heard love in its inflections. "But that's neither here nor there, Elena. I'm so glad I was able to find you before you awoke. You haven't much time before you return."

Elena exhales. "So I'm going back," she says. "I'm not dead."

"You are dead, but you aren't going to stay that way," Tatia tells her. "I'm sorry."

Elena blinks up at her. "Why are you sorry?" she asks. "That's… it's a good thing."

"Perhaps," says Tatia, "but you're disappointed nonetheless, and I'm sorry. I'm sure an eternity at rest sounds all too tempting, after all that you've had to fight."

Elena swallows.

"There are things you should know," Tatia tells her, and there's something more firm in her tone, more assertive. "That you must know, if you are to survive what is to come."

Elena narrows her eyes. "Can you… see the future?"

Tatia smiles. "No," she says. "But I know what Niklaus wants, and he will not rest until he achieves it."

"He's going to try to kill me again," Elena says. Except this time, there won't be a sacrifice, any method to it; she'll have betrayed him, and he'll want her dead, and he'll exact revenge.

"Niklaus wants to create more like him," says Tatia.

"Hybrids?" Elena asks, and frowns. "I thought Klaus was a hybrid because he was born with the werewolf gene. That can't be transferred to vampires, can it?"

"No," Tatia says, looking bemused, "but vampirism can be transferred to werewolves. Now that Klaus has broken the curse on himself, he should be able to turn other wolves, to make them like him."

That must have been what he wanted to learn from Lucien, why he'd been trying to figure out where to find werewolves. He wanted to track them down, and make them hybrids, like him. He's going to build an army.

"Niklaus is not going to be able to do so, however," Tatia tells her. "He'll believe that it's because you yet live."

"He can't make hybrids if the doppelganger isn't dead?" Elena asks.

"That will be his hypothesis. Niklaus believes death is the answer to any obstacle."

Elena peers up at Tatia, at the disapproval in the set of her mouth. "It's not, is it?" she says. "He'll be wrong."

"To create a hybrid, Niklaus will follow the same recipe that creates a vampire," Tatia says, and lifts her chin. "Feed a werewolf his blood and then kill it with the blood still in its system."

"Then drink the blood of a human to complete transition," Elena continues. "I remember."

Tatia shakes her head. "That's what Niklaus doesn't know," she says. "Any human's blood won't do. It has to be the blood of a doppelganger, of a human doppelganger. Anything else will end in abject failure."

Elena's whole body feels numb. Of course, of _course_ , of course she can't be finished after this, of course she can't be done and free. Klaus will need her blood for the rest of her life.

She shouldn't be surprised, not after everything, but she still feels winded at the realization. She shouldn't expect anything out of life anymore, but she still feels betrayed by it. She might not deserve better, but she wants it.

Tatia smiles that same sad smile. "As I said, little is fair," she says.

Klaus will make sure Elena doesn't die. After everything, she'll have to live longer than she ever expected to, longer than she ever wanted to.

This is winning. It tastes like mud and rust.

Elena looks around her, taking in the forest, the strange glow surrounding everything. It does look like night, she thinks, now that she's taking it in, but everything is bathed in light, colours swirling at the edges of every solid object so that nothing looks quite corporeal, and there's a slight transparency to Tatia, to even Elena's own hand, as though perhaps none of this is real, and none of this is being witnessed.

Elena swallows. "How long do I have here?" she asks. It's death, after all; and she's still sentient, still awake, still undergoing reality, but it's death, and there's something peaceful to it, despite everything.

"Not long, for us," Tatia tells her, voice still so gentle.

Elena frowns. "For us?"

Tatia looks over her shoulder, heavy braids falling against her chest, and for a moment Elena is possessed by the desire to touch her hair even though it's the same hair that grows from Elena's own head.

"Your passage… into death, and then back into life, it isn't instantaneous," Tatia tells her. "It's long, and slow; it's a process, and there's only a matter of minutes until you transition back into the realm of the living."

Elena frowns. "How long will it have been? When I wake up?"

Tatia shakes her head, concern etched into her features like a girl who's been worried since before she was born. "Days, perhaps? I can hardly say."

Elena wipes at her face, and then nods. "Okay," she says. Then she looks back up at Tatia, stares into her own eyes and searches, the way she's never searched Katherine's eyes.

"You knew them, didn't you?" Elena asks. "Klaus. And Elijah – back before the hybrid curse."

"Knew them?" Tatia asks, and there's a sad laughter in her tone, now. "Oh, Elena. I loved them."

"Both of them?" Elena asks, and tries to wrap her head around this. "Then why… were they playing you? How did you end up being sacrificed?"

Tatia laughs, now, for real, and it's low and sweet and makes Elena feel cold. "When I loved them, Elena, they were human."

Elena goes still.

"A thousand years ago," Tatia says, the words light as air on her tongue. "I'm sorry, I'd forgotten that you didn't know. They turned into what they are now a thousand years ago."

Elena swallows, eyes burning. "They were born human," she says, feeling ill. "Of course – and they were turned to vampires, they were the originals, I know that –"

"Niklaus and Elijah were two of seven children," Tatia says, and Elena wants to laugh and cry at that information; it's so human that it makes her sick. "The eldest of their siblings died in a plague, before even Elijah was born. Their family came to the New World with a Viking settlement in the 10th century, as did my family. We lived as neighbours to werewolves; one full moon, their youngest brother was killed by a villager."

Elena doesn't want to think of Klaus as having had a family, or as having experienced loss. Not now.

"Their mother was a powerful witch, and she devised vampirism in an attempt to ensure the continued survival of her remaining children. She fed them my blood, her husband cut them down with his sword, and they were born again as monsters. However, shortly after their transition, Niklaus triggered the werewolf curse. To suppress his hybrid nature, both to satisfy the spirits and to appease her husband, who had until then believed he was Niklaus's father, his mother cursed Niklaus's werewolf side to remain dormant–"

"–the first sacrifice," Elena says. "You."

Tatia offers her a smile. "And thus it began," she says.

"I'm sorry," Elena says. It's of no use, and this girl has had a thousand years to reflect, and Elena's condolences couldn't possibly mean anything, but she has to say them nonetheless. "Thank you… for telling me all of that."

"Don't thank me," Tatia says. There isn't a hint of a smile on her face anymore. "You would be far happier if you didn't know all that you do now. Knowledge is a cruel and wicked thing."

"Still," Elena says, and then swallows. "I'm safer for it, aren't I?"

Tatia laughs. The sound is bitter. "Since when is your safety of any value to you?" she asks, and Elena's stomach turns. "You and I both know that happiness, however fleeting, is a far more precious thing."

Elena frowns, and forces down the bile rising in her throat. "Why did you tell me all of that, then?"

"Because your safety is of value to me," Tatia says, and then closes her eyes. "Our safety," she says. "Perhaps I've more in common with Esther than I'd like to admit; I, too, want to ensure our continued survival."

"Esther?" Elena asks. "Is that… their mother's name?"

Tatia offers her a wry smile. "Again, you'd be better off not knowing that," she says, and then Elena feels a wave of exhaustion, so powerful she cannot help but lie back down.

Elena frowns. "Our continued survival?" she asks.

Tatia strokes a strand of hair out of Elena's face. "It's what we're here for," she says, voice so soft. "Our sacred mission, our ultimate duty. To survive, to continue our family, to make certain our blood runs through every chapter of history." She sighs. "It's a heavy burden, Elena, and now you share it."

Elena is exhausted by the thought. She's exhausted by a lot more than that, actually.

"We were born to die, Elena," Tatia tells her, "but we were born to ensure our line never does."

Elena wants to ask about Katherine, why Katherine has never shared these instincts, never tried to protect Elena for an instant, but she's too tired.

"Safe passage, Elena," she tells her, and Elena's eyelids are so heavy, but she can still see her own face staring back at her. "I'm sorry for everything."

. . .

She wakes up in Alaric's bed. She's still fully clothed, but she's boiling hot – she strips off her jeans and her jacket, takes off her bra from under her shirt, but doesn't take off her top, even though she's too warm to be dressed, just in case someone comes in.

So she's alive. She remembers her conversation Tatia in vivid detail, but there's something different about breathing real air, feeling corporeal, immersed in the tactile world. She'd been dead, talking to Tatia. Now she's alive again. She feels like there's a brick sitting in her chest.

She's still in Alaric's apartment, which means Klaus will find out she survived. She knows she can live, knows she has the necessary leverage, but she can't, she just can't, she doesn't want to have to think about strategy or survival or word games, if she has to be alive now then she just wants to get to live for a moment.

She lies in bed for god knows how long, just staring at the cracks in the ceiling. She doesn't – her mind feels numb where it should be overwhelmed, and she feels restlessness eating at every molecule of her body.

She's exhausted, but she doesn't want to sleep. She's anxious, but she doesn't want to move. She just wants to lie here forever.

Eventually, she hears the front door creak open, hears voices in the main room. She can't make them out. She should want to know what happened, if everything went according to plan, but she can't summon it within herself to care, to throw herself back into all of this, the drama and the horror and the fear. For once, she doesn't want to think about the fact that any number of people she loves could be dead. For one moment, she just wants to forget it all, to surrender to the closest thing to oblivion she'll ever get, now.

The door to her room opens, and without moving, she lets her eyes trail over to Klaus's – shirtless, it seems – figure.

He's silent for a moment. She doesn't think she's ever seen him speechless.

"Elena?" he asks.

Elena closes her eyes and sighs. "You're welcome," she says.

After another long moment of quiet, he walks forward, crossing the distance between them. He puts a knee up on the bed, and she sits up, leaving the sheet to cover most of her legs. "You managed to survive," he says. The 'how' is implicit, and she isn't going to test him, not today.

"Elijah gave me a… a potion," she says, because the truth is safest. "I didn't expect it to work, but I drank it anyway."

"And now here you are," he says.

She inhales deeply, knowing that her chest is heaving a bit as she does, knowing Klaus will notice.

"And now, here I am," she says. Her voice is breathy.

They stare at each other for – she doesn't know how long, it feels like forever. It's the first time Klaus has ever looked at her like he doesn't know what to do with her; every other time he's looked at her, he's known he would kill her. Now he has, but she's still here.

 _He's not going to kill me_ , Elena thinks. She doesn't know if she's known this all along, or if she's just realized it, or if she's just allowed herself to acknowledge it, but she can feel the tension melting from her limbs as the thought comes to her. She's still looking at her killer, but she's no longer looking at the man who is going to kill her; he has killed her, past tense, done and dealt with. The end date, the foregone conclusion of him and her, has come and gone; the future stretches out, boundless and unending, unknown to them both.

She sees in his eyes the exact moment he realizes he wants to have sex with her now; she knows he sees the exact moment she decides she might as well do it, now that she can.

She doesn't think he sees the moment it dawns on her that this is not a ploy or a trick, that this is not just born of her desire to lose herself in the fact of being alive; it's too horrible to be true, but–

–she realizes that she wants this, really wants this, in the pit of her stomach and with every burning inch of her skin. That she's wanted this for a while, if she's honest with herself; that she wants him, her killer.

She wants him, and now she _can_ want him; the knowledge floods her, and she lets herself drown in it.

They both shift at the same moment, and in seconds she is lowering herself onto her back and Klaus's lips are on hers, and she's leaning into it, searching, her hand on the back of his neck pulling him down to her, opening her mouth against his like he's oblivion and she wants to swallow it whole. Klaus throws the sheet and comforter off the bed and she is kissing Klaus. Klaus's hand is on her waist, slow and caressing, and she pulls up her legs so her knees are bent and the insides of her bare thighs are pressed against the skin of his naked torso, Klaus's palm somehow covers her entire _fucking_ butt cheek and she knows this _from experience_ , she can't even wrap her mind around how twisted this all is, and she doesn't even try to, just pulls him down closer to her. The thin fabric of her tank top is damp with sweat, and so flimsy that her nipples might as well be pressed against the burning hot skin of his chest. Everything is fiery hot, as though she's been reborn with the flames from the sacrifice imbued into her flesh; the two of them are not corporeal, they're a burning inferno, growing hotter and hotter by the second, poised to consume the entire world.

Klaus's hand slips inside her underwear and finds her clit right away. He's _good_ at this, she realizes, surprised because she'd assumed he was all take and no give. He isn't gentle, but she doesn't want him to be, and her breath hitches in her throat and her fingers clench in his hair and her hips move of their own accord. The small of her back slides against the sheets of the bed as she presses up against the weight of his fingers. Every inch of her body that is not searing under his touch feels like it does not exist at all.

Klaus growls against her mouth, sounding displeased with something, and then he's pulling her underwear down her legs and she's wriggling to help him, and then they're gone, and then just like that Klaus's mouth is gone from hers and his weight is gone from her body, and–

He nips her at the juncture on her thigh and her groin–no fangs–and she yelps in surprise. It doesn't hurt, but it feels like a rebuke, somehow, and then–

The first time Stefan had gone down on her, he'd left a trail of kisses from her jawbone to her hipbone. Klaus does nothing of the sort, but it's clear he knows what he's doing, and there's something methodical and matter of fact about the swirls of his tongue. She bites her lip to quiet the moan that threatens to escape her. _"I prefer my women willing_ ," she remembers him saying, and she's wet so embarrassingly quickly that it's obvious what job he was trying to get done.

He lifts himself back up and kisses her neck, and she wraps her legs around his waist because this isn't something either of them are planning to take their time with. She does moan when he enters her, just a little, and in response he bites down somewhere so tender she _knows_ it's the same place he bit her last night, and this does hurt. She scratches her nails down his back as hard as she can, just for good measure.

His hands pull up at the bottom of her tank top and she lifts her arms, still lying down, until it's off. Klaus's hand travels up the side of her ribcage, and she shivers when she feels his breath on her nipple, and gasps as his tongue draws lazy circles around it, arching her back against the drenched bed sheets. His pace is fast, but she matches it without effort, and the rocking of his hips against hers is just hard enough to hurt, and she likes it. She thinks his skin must be up against every inch of hers, burning hot against her chest, her arms, her legs, fire raging in the pit of her stomach. Both of their bodies are slick with sweat, and his mouth is warm on her lips, on her breasts, on her neck. She leans back against the pillows, her breaths coming quick and shallow.

She bites down on his bottom lip, and then remembers that she doesn't have to hold back for a second and bites down harder, hard enough to draw beads of blood she can taste against her tongue. She can feel the mark from her teeth disappear almost the second she makes it; the mark from his teeth on her neck will stay there forever, she knows this as well as she knows her own name, and so she buries her fingers in his hair and pulls his head down to the exposed skin of her throat, gasping as his fangs graze against her scar without drawing blood. He kisses her again, so hard that the back of her head is digging into the pillow. She laces her fingers together behind his neck, pulling him closer anyway.

She finishes before he does, which almost never happens when she's having sex, and his hands are firm and guiding on her waist until he finishes, not too long after. Her breathing is shallow and quick, and there's nothing sweet or sentimental about this but she pulls his face back down to hers for one last kiss, anyway. She no longer feels weightless and numb; her muscles ache and her head is heavy and her chest burns. She doesn't feel real unless some part of her hurts; only now, under the touch of the monster that killed her, does she feel alive again.

There's no cuddling after, not like curling up against Stefan's chest, or even she and Matt holding each other all night after their first time. Klaus lies beside her; she turns onto her stomach and props herself up on her elbows, her hair spilling down her back and over her breasts. Her chest is still heaving as she tries to catch her breath; Klaus gazes up at her, a grin playing at the corner of his mouth.

"How long have you been wanting to do that?" she asks, determined to be the first one to speak. She says the words as harshly as she can, and he laughs and tucks her hair behind her ear, pulling a little too hard for the motion to be tender.

"So," says Klaus, and for a moment he looks like he isn't quite as relaxed as he wants to appear, "here you are, alive. I have to admit, sweetheart, I did not see this coming."

She doesn't respond, just fixes him with an even gaze, waiting to see what he'll do, what he'll decide. She'd expected to be with her family if she woke up. She hadn't expected any of this.

"Oh, so now you've decided to be silent?" Klaus asks.

Elena exhales, and smiles at that, despite herself. "I just returned from the dead, cut me a break," she says, and it feels easy even though it shouldn't. "Besides, you're not the most sympathetic welcome back committee."

"And here I was under the impression that you were quite satisfied," Klaus says, and she laughs at that.

"You're a pig," she tells him.

He props himself up on his elbow and grins at her. "No, I'm a wolf," he says.

She rolls her eyes. "Then you're a dog," she says. He laughs, but she can see in his face that he's itching to say more, and she wonders if Klaus, for all his monstrousness and his posturing, is in this moment like anyone who's had a big night and wants to talk about it.

She doesn't know if he wants to tell her because she's here, or because she's his first choice in conversation partners.

She thinks he's happier that she's alive than he's willing to let on.

"So," she says, and tilts her face towards his, "a wolf, huh? What's that like?"

Klaus lies back down, resting his head against the pillows. "Well," he says, "I've turned before, of course, back before the curse was placed on me, but… I hadn't remembered how incredible it was, the rush, the clarity. I remember it all. The full moon came and went, and I remained a wolf–"

"And went?" Elena says, going rigid. "Wait, how long has it been?"

Klaus frowns. "A few days, now," he says. "Two, Elijah said."

"Wait, Elijah?" she asks, and sits up. "What–"

Klaus grimaces. "As it turns out, Elijah had devised a little plot to kill me during the ritual, based on a misconception that I'd disposed of the remains of our family members."

"A misconception you had nothing to do with giving him, I'm sure," Elena says. Klaus grins.

"Regardless," he continues, "once I assured him that our family was preserved in total safety, he agreed to join me, on the condition that I reunite him with the rest of them. Now I have done so, and my end of the bargain has been held up."

There's no way Klaus just gave Elijah what he wanted after Elijah plotted against him. Elena sighs. "What was the catch?"

Klaus looks pleased. "I happen to be in the possession of a set of daggers, which have the capacity to neutralize my siblings until such a time as I decide to remove the daggers from their hearts. They don't work on me, of course, as they're made of silver. My siblings have been resting comfortably with these daggers embedded in their hearts for quite a while, now."

"And you put a dagger in Elijah's heart, I take it?" Elena asks.

Klaus laughs. "Ah, I see death hasn't dulled your perceptiveness," he tells her. "I'm glad."

"You did tell me my death was a pity," she says.

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you're looking for me to tell you how glad I am you're alive?" The words are mocking.

Elena smiles. "You don't have to say it," she tells him.

Klaus looks taken aback for a moment, and then laughs, a real, surprised, delighted laugh.

For a moment, things seem like they're going to be okay.

Then there's a knock at the front door.

Elena frowns, and looks to Klaus, but Klaus's eyes are narrowed and any hints of his good mood have evaporated. "Well," he says. "How about that."

"What is it?" she asks.

Klaus looks to her, and there's something cruel in his eyes that hadn't been there before. "It looks like your boyfriend has come to pay us a visit," he says, and Elena's stomach drops.

 _Stefan_ , she thinks, and then she looks at Klaus's face, at the dark expression cast over it. _He's jealous_ , she thinks, and she knows it doesn't make sense, knows this isn't like Damon's childish fits of rage, knows this is some aspect of that terrible possessiveness that's always burning in Klaus's chest.

She could try to calm him, make a joke, _he's in for a surprise_ or _I'm not sure that stands after I lived with another guy for a month_ or just something, anything, but she can't because it's Stefan and she loves him and she's missed him and he's right outside and something has to be wrong, wrong, wrong for him to come calling, and this bridge she's managed to weave together beneath her is being cut to shreds and everything she's tried so hard to build is falling down around her.

Klaus smiles at her, and it's a smile he hasn't offered her in weeks, and it makes her blood run cold. "Put on some clothes, sweetheart," he tells her, and rises from the bed. "We have company."

. . . . . . .

 **A/N:** Thanks so much for reading! If you ever have any questions or want to talk, feel free to visit me on tumblr over at fellowshipofthefalls.


	10. do not stand at my grave and cry

She wrestles her tank top and jeans back onto her body, pulls on a bra for decency's sake even though Stefan will probably know the second he sees Elena, god, she just had sex with Klaus, she – she can't think about it. She can hear Klaus speaking, and she shoves open the bedroom door and rushes out after him –

– and there's Stefan, _god_ , Stefan's there, and his eyes meet hers and she thinks she's going to cry but she refuses to, Stefan, he says her name like a prayer and she blinks back tears, Stefan, Stefan, _Stefan_.

"You're alive," he says, and the words sound like they've been mutilated in his throat.

"Yeah," she says back, voice barely louder than a whisper. He looks at her like she's the only person in the world, like he's forgotten everything else around them, and she feels like a terrible person because she hasn't forgotten for a second that Klaus is right there, watching. It feels like severing off a part of her soul, but she wrenches her gaze away from Stefan and looks to Klaus.

She wraps her arms around herself, and doesn't look away from Klaus, not for a second. He still doesn't look pleased, but she doesn't think he looks angry at her, not anymore, and that has to be for the best.

"Stefan," Klaus says, at long last. "You were saying something about needing my help."

Elena looks back at Stefan, but Stefan, at last, has turned his attention away from her, is looking at Klaus.

"It's my brother," Stefan says, after a long moment.

"Ah, yes, Damon," Klaus says, and his mouth spreads into a grin. "The other Salvatore." He offers Elena a significant look, and she swallows, thinking about their conversation the other day, after Klaus had met Damon for the first time. "What kind of trouble has he concocted for himself now?"

"He was… he thought that you planned to use Tyler and Caroline for the sacrifice, and he tried to rescue them, and… he was bitten," Stefan says. Elena hears herself say "no" before she's even decided to speak. Klaus looks over at her, gaze searching, and then turns back to Stefan.

"And?" he asks. "What would you have me do about it?"

Stefan looks pained. "The witches… they said you had a cure."

In the blink of an eye, Klaus has Stefan pinned against the wall, and Stefan is groaning, and – Elena sees a stake in Klaus's hand, buried in Stefan's chest.

"Klaus, please!" If Klaus kills Stefan, it's not her fault because Klaus kills everyone, but then, it is her fault, if he's jealous – "Klaus, you promised. Stefan was on my list, please just help him."

"Ah, that's right," Klaus says. "Your list."

He pulls away, pulling the stake out, too, and Stefan collapses to the ground, breathing heavily, face pained, and alive, already healing. She breathes out in relief.

"Of course, Damon was on your list too, wasn't he?" Klaus says. There's something dangerous in his tone. "Does that mean I'm obliged to save his life, if I do indeed possess the means to do so?"

Elena swallows. "You didn't bite him," she says. "It's not your obligation."

"Thank you, sweetheart," Klaus says, and looks back to Stefan, a grin on his face. "I do so enjoy your girlfriend," he says. The sentence is laced with meaning; she knows Stefan will have picked up on it, may have already picked up on what happened, but refuses to look at his face. She doesn't think she could handle it.

"It's not your obligation," Elena says, "but Damon's my friend, and I don't want him to die." She swallows, and waits for Klaus's gaze to lock with hers. "Please. Are the witches right? Do you have a cure?"

Klaus stares at her for a long moment, and then grabs Stefan's arm and bites into his wrist. Stefan cries out, and Elena forces herself to stay still, to say calm, though she can't help her heart rate from rising. The bite spreads across Stefan's skin like something out of a horror movie, and Elena looks at Klaus. She knows he has a plan.

A moment later, Klaus bites into his own wrist and then shoves it against Stefan's mouth. Stefan gags for a moment and then drinks it, and just like that, the bite fades.

"Your blood is the cure," Stefan says, and Elena is annoyed, just for a moment; after a month of living with Klaus, Stefan's inclination to speak the obvious grates on her mind.

"What do you want for it?" Elena asks, because she can't stand wasting time on this mindless conversation.

Klaus smirks at her. "Who says I'm offering it?"

"You wouldn't have let on that you had a cure if you weren't proposing a trade," she returns. "What do you want for it?"

Klaus looks at her for a long moment, and then grins. "Would you grab me a drink, sweetheart?"

"Blood or bourbon?" she asks.

"O Negative," he replies. She gets a tumbler from the cupboard and pours him a glass, keeping a watchful eye on Stefan all the while. She sees Stefan's face twitch, just a little, and takes a deep breath. She pours herself a glass of water, and comes over to stand next to Klaus.

"Thank you, love," he says, taking the proffered glass. He doesn't sip from it, though. He just kneels down next to Stefan.

"See, I've no need for anything material," he says. "I can obtain anything I need with ease. Elena can attest to that. However, I am on the lookout for talent, and I've heard some truly marvelous tales about yours."

It takes Elena a moment, and then she catches onto what he's saying, what talent Klaus could be referring to, and then her blood runs cold.

Klaus had known who Stefan was when she'd first mentioned him. He's said she was well connected. She doubts Stefan's famous for being one of Katherine's dalliances, or for being Lexi's best friend, or for sticking to an animal diet.

She's seen Stefan off the wagon before, and that was only for a moment, only just on the edge of what he could be, and he couldn't stop drinking from that girl until Bonnie forced him to. She can imagine how much he'd have to be capable of to capture Klaus's interest – she can imagine it, and it terrifies her.

"Stefan isn't like that anymore," she says, because Stefan still hasn't caught on – god, was everyone in Mystic Falls always this slow?

"But he could be," Klaus says, and takes a long sip from his glass. "Elena, sweetheart, have you ever heard the stories about the Ripper of Monterrey?"

Elena swallows. "No," she says, and looks away.

"Ah," says Klaus, and she can hear the grin in his voice. "Well, then, allow me to fill you in. In 1917, your darling Stefan here waltzed into the migrant village of Monterrey and slaughtered everyone therein. Men, women, children, he drank every drop of human blood to be found in that town, and then he burned the village to the ground. Rumor has it, he feeds so hard he blacks out, and rips his victims to pieces, then puts their bodies back together out of some misguided sense of regret."

Elena thinks she's going to vomit. Klaus looks up at her, grinning, then crosses to the kitchen. She wants nothing more than to kneel at Stefan's side, but she follows Klaus. He grabs a vial from a cupboard, and then a knife from a drawer, and slices open his hand, letting blood stream out.

"That's what I want, Stefan," Klaus says. "I want you to come with me when I leave this town, and go on a good long bender with me. I want your service; I have quite the workload ahead of me, and I could use a right-hand man with gifts like yours."

Stefan is already shaking his head. "I don't–" he says, and then Klaus moves to pour the vial down the sink and Elena places a hand over his.

"Wait," she says. Klaus looks at her, and then looks back at Stefan.

"Well?" he asks.

She doesn't know what Stefan does, but it has to be something agreeable, because Klaus opens the fridge and pulls out a blood bag.

"I'd like you to join me for a drink, mate," he says, and tosses the bag at Stefan. Elena looks back, and sees Stefan take a sip.

"Finish it," Klaus says. "All of it. That's the deal; you do everything I say, and I save your brother."

It takes forever for Stefan to lift the bag back up to his mouth, but he does, and veins crawl down his face as he drinks, crushing the bag in his hand.

He drops the bag on the ground, and Klaus throws him another bag, and says "again," and on, and on.

Elena's been afraid before, been disgusted before, but she'd forgotten the singular horror of seeing Stefan reduced to… to this animal, to this creature, veins a permanent fixture beneath his eyes, blood spilling down his face, his neck, his clothes, speaking only in grunts and moans. Klaus walks too close to him to bring him his fourth blood bag, and Stefan lurches towards Klaus's open glass of blood.

"Stefan!" Elena exclaims, and Stefan advances on her, growling, and then Klaus is between them, his free hand holding Stefan back, and then Stefan's veins recede and guilt takes their place, and then Klaus gives him another blood bag and tells him to drink and he does, and Elena stands behind Klaus as they watch, gut twisting. Klaus has a hand around Elena's elbow; his grip isn't tight, but he could pull her away in an instant if Stefan loses control again.

She hates that the knowledge reassures her.

"So, mate," Klaus says, when Stefan's finished his fifth blood bag. He heads over and crouches next to him, holding a sixth. "Do we have a deal? I save your brother, and you leave town with me, committed to embracing your true nature to its fullest extent."

Stefan swallows.

"Or you could let Damon die," Klaus says.

Stefan takes the blood back, tears it open, and drinks greedily from it. Klaus steps back and grins. "That's the spirit."

Elena doesn't know what this means, whether they're all leaving town together, what Klaus has planned for her, if she's staying or leaving, but then Klaus looks at her and leans over to pick up the vial of his blood.

"Well," he says. "Sweetheart."

Elena meets his eyes, and wishes she knew what the hell he has in mind.

"I want you to bring this to Damon," he tells her. No compulsion.

Elena swallows, heart pounding in her chest. "You mean–"

Klaus smirks, and shoots a glance at the door. "I'd hurry, if I were you."

She takes the vial and walks to the door, forcing herself not to break out into a run. She shoots one last glance over her shoulder at Stefan, then at Klaus, before stepping out into the hallway.

She stumbles to the elevator, almost unable to walk, and makes her way down to the lobby. She manages to nod at the man at the front desk, and then rushes out into the cool night air.

She takes a deep shuddering gasp, wrapping her arms around herself, and starts to cry. She allows herself three shaking sobs, and then swallows, her throat sore, and makes her way to the nearest payphone, presses 0, and waits.

"Hi," she says, trying to keep her voice solid. "I'd like to place a collect call…"

After a few moments, she gets Alaric on the phone.

"Who is this?" he asks, sounding exhausted, and she presses her hand to her mouth upon hearing his voice.

"Ric?" she asks.

"Elena?" he says. He sounds fully alert now. "Elena, oh my god, how – "

"Can you come pick me up?" she asks.

Alaric is silent for a moment. "What do you–"

"He let me go," she says, trying not to choke on the words. "I survived, and he let me go, and I have a – a cure for Damon. Can you please come?"

Alaric is quiet another moment, then asks: "Where are you?" She gives him the intersection, and he promises to be there as soon as possible.

She doesn't know where he was coming from, but he's there so quick she assumes he broke half a dozen traffic laws to get to her. He jumps out of the car and crosses to where she's standing in three long strides, and she falls into his open arms, shivering.

"Elena," he says, his voice soothing, and he smells like alcohol, he shouldn't be driving if he's been drinking, but it's not like she's in any state to drive either, and they have to get to Damon, "Elena, you're okay, you're safe."

She nods, then pulls back and wipes a few tears off her face. "We have to get to Damon," she says. "The cure – the cure is Klaus's blood."

Alaric raises an eyebrow. "Why did he give it to you?"

Elena swallows. "Stefan exchanged… his service, himself, I don't–" A sob rises in her throat. "We don't have time for this," she says.

They drive in silence to the Salvatore boarding house, and Elena feels sick with relief at seeing it. Elena jumps out of the car before Alaric's turned off the engine, and she runs straight into the house.

"Damon?" she calls. There's no response.

"He was upstairs when I left," says Alaric, appearing behind her. Elena sprints up the stairs to Damon's room and throws open the door.

Damon's there, lying on a bed. He gives her a lazy grin. "Hello there," he says.

Elena shakes her head. "Damon, what–?"

Damon raises his eyebrows at Alaric. "Looks like my subconscious decided to cut me a break," he says, slurring his words like he's drunk. He points a weak finger at Elena. "Or are you… here to blame me, too? 'Cause that would suck."

"Damon, it's really me, I'm really here," she says, and walks over, climbing up on the bed next to him.

Damon hums. "Oh, this is nice."

"Damon," she says, voice sharp. "I have a cure."

Damon's gaze snaps up to hers, and there's clarity in his eyes. "What?"

She holds up the vial, and carefully unscrews the cork. "It's Klaus's blood. Stefan–"

Damon's hand grasps her elbow, and were it not for his weakened state he would have knocked the vial out of her hand. "Elena?" he whispers, sounding like a drowned man gasping for air. "You're really here? You're alive?" He turns to Alaric. "Ric, am I–"

"You're not hallucinating, man," Alaric says. "Now drink the damn cure."

Damon's eyes are wider than she's ever seen them, but when she pours the blood down into his mouth he complies, and swallows every drop. Then he pulls himself to a sitting position – either the shock of seeing her has given him an adrenaline rush or this blood really is working, and fast – and he reaches a hand up to touch her cheek.

"How are you alive?" he asks.

Elena swallows, and leans into his touch, just a little. "Elijah's elixir," she tells him.

Damon lets out an amazed little laugh. "That actually worked?"

She puts her hand over his, lacing their fingers together. "Oh, ye of little faith," she says, and he laughs again.

"Elena," says Alaric, and she turns around to see him holding out his phone. "Elena, you have to call your family. They don't know. It's been days, we all figured you'd dead, that the serum had failed–"

"Oh my god," says Elena, and clambers over to grab the phone. He already has the display at her home number; she hits call, and waits, breathless.

"Hello?" says Jenna's voice.

Elena starts to cry. "Jenna?" she says, and then hiccups out something between a laugh and a sob. "Jenna, oh my god–"

"Elena?" Jenna asks.

Elena nods, and then remembers that Jenna can't see her. "Yeah, it's me," she says, and holds a hand to her mouth to still the quivering of her lips. "It's me, I'm here, I'm okay."

"Oh my god," says Jenna, and then she hears some noise before Jeremy is calling "Elena?" into the phone and she hears John say "put it on speaker!"

"I'm with Ric," she says, when everything's settled down, even though it's obvious because she's calling from his phone. "I–I'm on my way home."

"He let you go?" John asks.

Elena swallows. "Yeah," she says, and doesn't say _for now_ , even though she knows that her days are numbered before he realizes he can't make hybrids and comes looking for answers.

She doesn't say that, though. She doesn't have to think about it, not yet, not after everything.

She's going home. She's with Damon and Alaric, and she's going to see Jeremy and Jenna and John, and Caroline and Bonnie and Matt and Tyler, too, later, and she doesn't have forever, and she doesn't have Stefan anymore – god, Stefan – but she has this, now, and she'd never let herself believe it was possible.

Damon insists on coming with them, even though he's still looking pretty sick, because he refuses to let her out of his sight until he's sure she's real, and when Alaric pulls up in front of Elena's house Jeremy is already bounding down the stairs, and she throws herself into his arms and weeps into his shoulder, holding on for dear life. After an eternity of Jeremy, holding him, smelling him, _Jeremy_ , she steps back and Jenna wraps her arms around her and holds her tight, squeezing hard enough to hurt, and Elena squeezes back.

"I'm so sorry," Jenna says, "I was supposed to protect you–"

"Jenna, I'm fine, I'm okay," she says, through her own tears. "It's all over." That part is a lie, but she keeps that information to herself.

John is standing next to her, but he looks lost, staring at her while holding himself completely still.

She looks at him for a long moment, and then steps towards him and hugs him. She's hugged him before, but as a kid, when her parents would tell her to go say goodbye to her Uncle John. This is different; after a moment, his arms reach up and fasten around her back in a death grip, like if he lets go for a second it will turn out that none of this is real.

Later, once they're in the living room and Elena's wrapped in a blanket and Jeremy's on the couch next to her and Jenna is crying across the room and John is still looking at her with amazement, and Damon is lying on the floor, still recovering from his brush with death, and Alaric is in the kitchen making tea, Jeremy thinks to start calling everyone. He calls Bonnie first – Elena thinks there's something there, but doesn't ask – and then he calls Caroline, and then Matt and Tyler, and Elena is on the phone with everyone laughing and crying, and it isn't long before everyone's piled into her house with sleepover bags. A few times, someone starts to ask a question, but Jeremy shushes them all, and Elena loves him so, so much.

She sleeps on the couch that night, surrounded by people who love her, and refuses to think about where Stefan is right now. She doesn't let herself feel guilty for pushing that grief from her mind; she's earned one night of this.

. . .

The next morning, Elena asks Alaric what he did with Isobel's body.

"I buried her," he tells her, and looks a little ashamed. "At – her parents had an empty grave for her. I buried her in it."

"Will you take me?" she asks.

Isobel died for her. She didn't die willingly, of course, and she didn't care about Elena for a second, but she died because of Elena nonetheless; she died because Klaus wanted to give Elena a gift, and had decided that Elena's mother's death was a worthy boon.

Elena thinks about Klaus's mother. Esther, Tatia had called her. Did Klaus wish Esther had died? Did he hate her? Did he kill her? Or did he wish he had, and had killed Elena's mother in some sort of wish-fulfilling act? Either way, it doesn't matter. Elena's mother is dead because she was Elena's mother, because she'd made a mistake as a teenager.

"If Isobel had kept me, do you think you still would have married her?" Elena asks Alaric.

Alaric looks over at her from the driver's seat for a moment, then looks back at the road. "I'd like to think so," he says. "I mean, I was an adult when I fell in love with her, not a scared kid. I'd have loved her no matter what."

It hurts Elena, to think of a world where Isobel had kept her and Alaric had become her father. She wouldn't take either of them over her parents, because they were her parents and they loved her, and because she wouldn't have known Jeremy; but then, when Isobel had left to become a vampire, she still would have had one parent.

Or maybe it all would have gone differently. Maybe, if she'd raised her, Isobel would have loved her enough to stay. Maybe Alaric would never have had his heart broken by the murder of his wife. Maybe her parents would never have died because she called them to pick her up from a stupid party on a bad night to be on the roads, and Jeremy would never have been orphaned at fourteen.

It all could have been worse, or it all could have been better, but it is what it is.

Elena stands over her mother's grave and reads her tombstone. _In Loving Memory_. Elena has no loving memories of her mother, no affection, nothing but the hollow shame at the fact that she's relieved that Isobel is dead.

"What was she like?" she asks Alaric. Alaric seems startled, as though until she

spoke to him he had been in a stupor. "When she was human, I mean," she says. "When you loved her. What was she like?"

Alaric swallows. "She was… curious," he says. "So curious, and inquisitive, and determined. She was smart, so smart." He hesitates. "She… she would have loved you. I don't… I don't know if she would have been a good mom, but she would have wanted to be."

"She never told you about me, though, right?" Elena asks.

"No," Alaric says. "She didn't." He looks over to her. "But… when she was human, she wasn't like she was when you knew her. She was… she could be distant, in her own world, but she was warm, and loving, and… I wish you could have known her."

"But I didn't," Elena says. "I never will." She looks down at the grave, at the dirt piled above her mother's dead body.

"I'm sorry," Alaric tells her.

Elena shakes her head. "No, I – Ric, I'm so sorry. I know you loved her, and now she's dead because of me–"

"She's been dead for years, Elena," Alaric says. "And it's been years since she was the woman I married." He sighs. "But yeah, I'm sorry too."

Elena stares at her mother's grave, and stays there long after Alaric mutters something about needing to get out of there and waiting at the car. She and her mother had both died the same night, under the same full moon, at the hand of the same man.

Isobel might be the same place Tatia was, Elena realizes, that purgatory for the supernatural. She might be watching. Elena swallows.

"I'm sorry," she says, out loud, feeling a little silly. "I don't know if you're listening, or if you care. But I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that death. You didn't deserve to die for a daughter you never wanted, and I'm sorry."

She stays there until she feels mosquitos nipping at her skin, coming with the setting of the sun, and then she heads back to Alaric's car. She doesn't look back.

She doesn't think she'll ever visit again.


	11. the valley of the shadow of death

**PART III**

 _I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead_

 _I lift my lids and all is born again_

 _(I think I made you up inside my head)_

\- Sylvia Plath

It takes Elena a week to get used to being in her own bed when she wakes up in the morning. She always wakes up in the dark, feeling cold and lost, with flames and fangs and looking glass reflections of herself dancing at the edges of her every dream. She can't look in her own mirror much anymore; she'll never take down the pictures of her parents she has tucked into the frame, but she can't look at their smiles, at her beaming face, standing between them, without feeling sick to her stomach. She isn't that girl anymore; if that girl hadn't died going off Wickery Bridge, then she'd been killed for good under the full moon in a clearing in the woods, on a warm April night. She looks at the image of her parents, and thinks, _your daughter is dead, and the girl who wears her skin is damned_.

Somewhere along the way, another girl, a girl who left heaven behind and climbed into bed with the monsters, crawled into Elena Gilbert's dead body and started talking with her voice and walking through her life. She might share the same face, the same name, the same memories, but she's another creature entirely. She's the cracks in five-year-old Elena's shattered mirror, the night terrors eleven-year-old Elena wakes up screaming from.

The girl who wears her skin invited the creatures of the night into her home. The girl who wears her skin slept with the monster under Elena Gilbert's bed.

The girl who wears her skin took off her red hood, and let herself get eaten by the wolf.

But Elena Gilbert, the loving sister, the popular cheerleader, the town's favourite daughter, is dead. And the girl she is now is alive. And all that's left to her is to get up in the morning and try to live Elena Gilbert's life – she owes the dead girl inside her that much.

She owes it to Jeremy, and to Jenna, and even to John, too, if only for the looks on their faces when they see her come downstairs every morning, like they thought her return was a fever dream and had talked themselves out of believing it was true. She'd thought going home would mean returning to normalcy, but of course nothing is normal, or ever will be again. John asks her questions, and when she answers he listens, so intent on her words that she wants to shout at him to interrupt her like he's her pain in the ass of an uncle, not a father who'd been unable to stop his daughter from walking to her death. Jeremy asks her questions about Brontë and Dickens and Wilde, and after she pushes the subject reveals that he'd read all of her favourite books while she was gone to feel close to her – her rebellious baby brother, who wouldn't even read her texts just weeks ago.

She doesn't know how different Jenna acts, because when she'd left Jenna hadn't known about vampires or werewolves or witches or any of it, and now she knows more than just the truth about the horror stories adults in Mystic Falls tell children at night; she knows the truth about Isobel, Elena's mother and Alaric's ex-wife; she knows the truth about compulsion, about memories that had been stolen from her and thoughts that had been planted without her consent; she knows what happened to Vicky Donovan, to Logan Fell, even to Mason Lockwood – she knows what goes bump in the night, and why the people in her life have a life expectancy equal to that of a particularly lucky child soldier.

On top of everything, though, there's the fact that Stefan's gone; Stefan, who had become the pillar of stability in her life after her parents had died and her world had fallen to chaos, Stefan, who'd been the steady rock for her to lean on as she adjusted to a reality where the dead walked among the living and the miracles that once marked men as prophets could be performed by girls with grime in their hair and blood on their faces and steel in the set of their jaws. Stefan was the buoy she latched onto when she was being swept away in the current, Stefan was the foundation on which she built a new normal, Stefan was the pillar that she propped herself up on to see the world from a standpoint she could rationalize. Normal is Stefan, and Stefan is gone.

She stays home for two weeks without going to school, her family and friends all carrying on the story that she's suffered a severe concussion and can't get to class. She has to stay in the house for the story to hold up, but she doesn't want to go anywhere, anyway. She stares at the walls of her house, walks through the halls and up and down the stairs with no aim, shirking away from her reflection in mirrors and windows. She asks Jeremy to teach her to play some of his video games, and tries to lose herself in the mindlessness of it all, pressing the same buttons again and again while staring at a screen. Sometimes Jeremy has to say her name three or four times for her to remember where she is; sometimes, she falls asleep on the couch, and John or Jenna shake her awake because she was so perfectly still it made them afraid.

Sometimes, she wakes up, and it takes her a moment to realize she isn't dead. It always comes as a bit of a disappointment.

She doesn't have that many questions to answer when she's back at school, because by all accounts Katherine did an impressive job of impersonating her; that, or nobody bothered to notice the differences. She doesn't care either way. Caroline and Bonnie walk her to her every class, even when they have their next period on the opposite side of the building, and one of them is always there to meet her when the bell rings. They start coming over for movie nights almost every night – Caroline will suggest they go out somewhere nice every once in a while, but Elena always turns down the idea. Neither John nor Jenna ever comment on noise, or it being a school night, and after these nights start to become regular occurrences she notices that the liquor cabinet is being stocked with bottles of Grey Goose even though she's the only one with a penchant for vodka in the house.

It doesn't feel normal, but after almost a month at home, she starts to feel like a real girl again, a girl with a life, with friends, with a routine. There's still a dead girl inside of her – there always will be – but the girl inside Elena Gilbert's skin is starting to feel like she's living again.

It's only fitting that Elena has been surrounded by the dead for so long, has felt dead for so long, that she'd forgotten the bright, cold truth about what it means to be alive. It's only fitting that Elena, who's been forced to bleed again and again because of the awful power that runs through her veins, would meet her undoing by a lack of blood.

It's so perfect, so cruel and terrible and perfect, that after a year of mastering the art of cleaning bloodstains out of anything, Elena wakes up on what should be the first day of her cycle to spotless white fabric.

She ignores the strange certainty clutching at her lungs, pounding in her head, pumping in her heart, and gives herself the rest of the day to be late, to be thrown off because of stress and shock and death, but Elena Gilbert has never, not once in her entire life, not gotten her period on time, like clockwork. Furthermore, Elena Gilbert may have died, but the girl Elena Gilbert is right now is not dead, is alive and breathing and _aging_ , and, most important of all, as Tatia had told her, _warned_ her, in that grey area between the living and the dead, the doppelganger is designed to reproduce, to bear children, to carry on the bloodline. Elena Gilbert is not barren.

She doesn't want to admit it, but she knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what this means.

She stays up all night, going through each and every option in her mind. She can't go to any of her family, of course, they'd all yell at her and she couldn't live with the way they'd look at her if they found out, or the way Caroline or Bonnie or Tyler or Matt would look at her– she can't stand to think of it. She can't imagine asking Alaric something like that, either, so he's off the list. She wishes Stefan were here, but she wishes Stefan were here all the time and there's nothing she can do about it.

She thinks Damon is probably her best bet, not that any of her bets are particularly good. She goes over to the Salvatore house the next morning, late enough that the sun is up but early enough that no one in her family is awake, and sits on a couch and waits until Damon comes home from whatever bender he and Alaric were on the night before.

"How long have you been there?" asks Damon, stopping in the doorway and then appearing in front of her in the blink of an eye. "You could have called, if you needed something."

She's going to say _I couldn't call_. She takes a deep breath and swallows, but before she can get out the words Damon kneels in front of her.

"Elena?" he asks, voice gentle. "What's wrong?"

She swallows, sets her jaw, steels herself. "I need a favour," she says. The sentence starts out strong, but fades into little more than a whisper.

"Yeah, of course," says Damon.

Elena cannot speak for at least thirty seconds, but at last she forces the words out. "I need you to buy me a pregnancy test."

Elena has never seen Damon look so completely shocked; his eyes are enormous and his jaw has dropped, and his gaze is searching hers so earnestly it makes her want to cry. He seems angry, for a second, then maybe jealous, then afraid. "Who–" he says, after a full minute, and then Elena feels her eyes burn and she can see in his eyes that he knows.

Damon swallows, and Elena holds her breath. "Did he–"

"No," says Elena, the word falling out of her in a rush. "Damon–" She's trying so hard not to cry. "Damon, I can't–I can't talk about it–I need to know, Damon, I can't talk about it until I know."

Damon looks down, and she doesn't know what he's thinking, but when he looks up, his face is resolved, and maybe a little sad. "Of course," he says, and that's that.

He goes to a drugstore a town over, just to be safe, and comes back with four different brands. He sits next to her while she reads the instructions; she doesn't say a word, just forces herself to digest the information, to make sure she does this right. Once she's read them all, she picks up her bag and walks to one of the stupidly big bathrooms. She pees dutifully on each stick, and then lines them up on the marble floor, and waits the designated two minutes.

They're all positive.

She can't breathe, can't think, she thought she'd steeled herself for this but she hadn't. Her breaths are ripping through her throat like knives and she's sobbing, just howling, and she lifts her hand to her mouth but can't seem to quiet herself. The door bursts open and Damon sinks down next to her and gathers her in his arms before even looking over at the tests. She sobs and sobs into his shirt, getting tears and snot on it, but she can't calm herself down.

She'd been supposed to live. That was the point of surviving, wasn't it? To live a real life, wake up and find a way to move on, finish high school and go to college and somehow start feeling like a real girl again, and she'd known for a while that that wasn't going to happen but now she really really knows it.

"Can I stay here, tonight?" she asks, when she's calmed her sobs down.

Damon looks at her like he doesn't understand what she's asking, and she could smack him.

"I don't think I can go home tonight," she says, instead. "I need to – I need to think."

"Of course," Damon says.

He pours himself a bourbon, and she can see him almost offer her one before catching himself, and _shit_ , she's been drinking, these past few weeks – she laughs out loud, and Damon looks at her with concern and a bit of wariness, but she can't stop laughing. She's pregnant, of course she's pregnant, that's what she was born for, right? That's what Tatia had warned her about – they're born to bear children, and they're born to die, and Elena's always been an overachiever so it only figures she's got both on lock before she's even turned eighteen. Of course she starts thinking like a pregnant woman in the space of a moment, because she was born to be pregnant, it's the only thing she was ever meant to do, be a human incubator and ensure that her line continued, and then die a beautiful, poetical death.

It takes her a few minutes to get control over her laughter. When she does, though, and Damon gives her a questioning gaze, she replies, "Hormones."

Hormones. Because she's pregnant. She can't stop laughing about it, and she doesn't want to stop laughing, because if she stops laughing she's going to cry, and if she stops crying she's going to start screaming and never stop.

She manages to sleep that night, and by the next morning, she's devised a plan. She's not going to worry about Klaus, not for the first trimester, at least – he's bound to come back to town sooner or later, and if it's sooner, she isn't going to rush it. She'll spend as much time here as possible. She'll finish this year of high school, but she knows there's no real chance of her finishing senior year; not just because she's a little too proud to be the school's pregnant teenager, but because if she's obviously pregnant and Klaus doesn't know, he'll be furious. Still, if he hasn't shown up, she'll start the year, and see what happens. Getting to go to school isn't something she can take for granted anymore, and she almost didn't get the chance to be a senior.

The hardest part is going to be telling people. She wasn't forced into anything, and she isn't going to pretend she was, but she has to spin this just right – she isn't the victim, but she won't be the idiot who went all moon-eyed for her murderer, and she won't be the Katherine who fucked her way to getting what she wanted.

(When it comes down to it, in this moment, she misses Katherine; she thinks Katherine would understand why she did what she did. "There's another way out," Katherine had once told her, and, inadvertent though it may have been, Elena's found it. She's saved her own life.)

She heads home, makes tea, asks her family to come sit in the living room with her. They all come at a moment's notice, of course – everyone's at her beck and call, now that she's died.

"I want to tell you something," she says, once they're all seated. "About – about when I was with Klaus."

They're all rapt with attention, just like she knew they'd be. Ever since she got back, she hasn't said a word about what happened that month.

"Did he hurt you?" John asks.

She's answered that question a hundred times, but of course, it's where John's mind goes first. "No," she answers, in a calm voice. She purses her lips, and looks down. A big part of her hates the way they look at her, like she's some holy creature bathed in golden light, but just as big of a part of her is terrified of what will happen if they stop looking at her like that. Still. It changes nothing.

She takes a deep breath. "The thing you have to understand," she says, and then swallows before continuing, "is that – I had to make choices." She looks up, and meets Jeremy's eyes. "And… no one forced me to make them, and, maybe things would have been okay if I'd chosen differently, but I did the best I could with what I had to keep all of you safe. To keep everyone safe."

She saved herself. That's the card she has in her back pocket, and if she can play it just right, just modest and humble and vulnerable enough, while still convincing them that she wanted to save herself, she can make sure this goes the way she wants it to.

She inhales. "And… when I realized that I could survive, that I could take the elixir, and then when I woke up, I…" She exhales. "I made the choices that I thought gave me the best chance to come back. To come home. And, I don't know, maybe I would have gotten home with other choices too, but I'm not sure, and I did what I thought best, and I don't have any regrets, okay?"

"Elena," Jeremy says. His voice is steady. "It's okay, just… what did you do?"

She swallows, looks to John, looks to Jenna, and then finally, locks her eyes with Jeremy. She can do this, she tells herself. She can say these words.

She shakes her head, just a tiny bit, and feels tears pricking at her eyes. "I'm… I'm pregnant," she says.

Everything is still for a moment. Through the screen door in the kitchen, Elena can hear a summer breeze blowing through the trees.

"Were you inseminated?" John asks, finally. "By a donor–"

"By Klaus," Elena responds, pressing her eyes shut, reminding herself to breathe, and to not think about everything she's afraid of. "I don't know how it's possible but it is, and," she laughs, without humor, "and I don't want to _talk_ about how it happened because – I don't – it just, it just is, okay?" She wipes at a hot tear, just underneath her eye. "I never thought that – I just, I did what I had to do, okay? I did what I had to do, and I would do it again."

She throws the final words out like a gauntlet. This wasn't how she'd planned it, isn't how she'd envisioned saying it at all, and she braces herself for judgment, for disgust, for the revulsion in their eyes before meeting their gazes.

They're looking at her the same way they always have.

"Elena," John says, his voice more gentle than she thinks she's ever heard it. "Elena, it's okay, of course it's okay."

Elena's lips tremble, and her vision swims, heat raging behind her eyes.

"I'm sorry," Elena says, choking on her words a little. "I didn't – I didn't mean to turn out like her–"

She can feel the waterworks threatening to burst forth, and Jenna jumps up from her armchair and comes to sit next to Elena, slides an arm behind Elena's back so Elena can lean her full weight on her, and Elena shakes and shakes.

"You're nothing like her, Elena," John says.

She's a pregnant teenager.

For a moment, she can't even remember to be sad or scared or bitter about Klaus, about dying, about doppelgangers or any other supernatural shenanigans. For a moment, all she can think about is her mother taking her to the doctor the moment Elena told her how serious things were getting with Matt and getting her a prescription for birth control, her mother telling her, in no uncertain terms, that she was going to be safe and she was going to be careful and wasn't going to throw her future away by having a baby before she was ready to.

 _I'm so sorry_ , she thinks to her mother.

Jenna cups her face in her hands, pulls her chin up to look at her. "Hey," she says, and Elena can tell by her voice that Jenna is holding back tears too. "Look, Elena, you have options, okay?"

Elena shakes her head. "No, I don't," she says, looking down.

"Look at me," Jenna says, and Elena meets her eyes. "There is nothing wrong with getting an abortion, okay? If that's what you want to do, there is nothing wrong with that, I don't care what Pastor Young says–"

"Do you think that's how Klaus is going to feel, when he finds out?" Elena asks. "Because he will find out, sooner or later. You think I haven't thought about this? I don't _have_ options, Aunt Jenna, I'm just–"

She wishes she could stop crying, she can't stand that she can't stop crying, but she dissolves into tears into Jenna's shoulder again.

"Okay," Jenna says, stroking Elena's hair. "Okay, then. You know what? I'll make you an appointment with my gyno, okay? I'm sure she can fit you in for sometime next week. Does that sound good?"

Seeing doctors has been a source of comfort to Elena her entire life. She nods.

"Okay," Jenna says, and starts stroking Elena's hair again. "You're gonna be okay, Elena. It's all gonna be okay."

They both know it isn't, but for a moment, Elena chooses to let herself believe her.

. . .

Maybe it's because they're all stepping on eggshells around her, or maybe it's because they're all scared Elena will disappear at a moment's notice, never to return, but her friends take the news pretty well. Caroline offers her a forced smile and announces that they need to invest in maternity magazines; Bonnie doesn't seem to be able to say anything, but she squeezes Elena's hand and gives her a shaky smile. Matt is strange about it, but Matt's known about the supernatural for even less time than Jenna has, and he never says anything thoughtless to Elena, even though she knows his head must be spinning with questions and horrified thoughts. Tyler is a dick about it in the best, most Tyler way possible – Caroline always tries to shush him when he makes an insensitive comment, but Elena laughs at every one of his jokes, even the really bad ones.

The world keeps spinning, and life continues. It's not normal, and it's not okay, but it just is, and Elena's been through a lot worse.

Jenna's gyno is a very nice woman, who confirms that yes, Elena is pregnant, and refers her to a male doctor in Richmond. That doctor is nice, too, though she knows he thinks she's just another pregnant teenager with a deadbeat baby daddy who isn't in the picture, and when Elena insists that the father is away on business but not gone, she can tell he doesn't believe her. It shouldn't matter, but she's seventeen and pregnant and her pride is all she has.

The summer passes. She turns eighteen, and while she was supposed to have a blowout party or go to Montreal or do something that involved getting hammered, Tyler instead gets his mom to let them all head to his family's place in Virginia Beach. They lay in the sun, marathon all their favorite movies from when they were kids, dance around in pajamas; Caroline forces her and Bonnie to do the routine they'd made up to 'Don't Phunk With My Heart', back when they were still in middle school, still just fantasizing about being cheerleaders. It's the best weekend Elena's had in a long time.

It's a better summer than Elena expected to have. It's probably a better summer than she deserved to have, and it's a summer she was never supposed to live to see. She enjoys it as best she can.

She knows, the whole time, that it's going to end all too soon.

 **A/N:** **Thank you all so much for being so patient. The regular twice-a-week updates should resume now! This was a gamechanging chapter, obviously, and I really, really hope you all liked it, and are as excited as I am for where this story is going. Klaus will be back in the next chapter, I promise!**


	12. for thine is the kingdom

Elena answers the phone even though she's asleep, because by now she knows better than to ignore a call in the middle of the night. "Hello?" she says, voice raspy, vision groggy. She remembers, a moment later, that this probably isn't an emergency; it's senior prank night, and she'd bet it's just Caroline calling her to try and talk her into coming after all.

"Elena?" It is Caroline – and she sounds like she's crying. Elena sits right up in bed, moving so fast she feels a twinge in her back.

"What is it? What happened?" asks Elena, and then remembers that she has all the time in the world, that there's no one standing over her to take the phone away, that she doesn't need to rush to get information. "Are you okay?"

"It's Tyler," says Caroline, and sniffles. "He… No, it's… Elena, it's Klaus, Klaus is back."

Elena's chest is aching like she's been hit with a brick; it takes her a minute to realize she's stopped breathing, and she exhales, slow and steady. The whole world seems to fall into place around her; she knows what's going to happen. She knows what she has to do. She knows how to make things okay.

"What happened to Tyler?" she asks.

Caroline sniffles again. "Elena…"

Elena closes her eyes. "Care, just tell me what happened."

"Klaus g-gave him his blood and then killed him," she says, which is exactly what Elena expected. "He's transitioning into a hybrid but Klaus said no one's transitioned successfully yet so he's making Bonnie try and figure out, figure out why–"

Elena sighs. "I'm on my way," she says. "Don't - don't let Tyler drink anything or, or do anything, I'll be there soon."

The line is silent for a moment. "Elena, you don't have to–"

"Yes, I do," she says, and swallows. "It's all going to be okay, Caroline, just… I'm on my way."

She allows herself to sit in bed for another minute, taking deep breaths, thinking everything through. She always knew this day was going to come. She'd known it would have to be soon– she'd gotten four months to try and live, to recover, to be with her family, and she hadn't even really expected that much. This was going to be okay. Klaus wasn't going to kill her. She can do this; she _has_ to do this, and it's all going to be fine.

She pulls on a loose sundress that hides her stomach – she'll have to tell him today, but she isn't walking into a warzone with a blatant bump – and she puts on a little makeup, even though it's ridiculous, even though she shouldn't care at all. She runs her flat iron through her hair, to reassure herself more than anything else, and then grabs her purse.

She isn't going to be living at her house again, maybe ever, she realizes, with a dull sense of surprise; but this isn't last March. She's going to have to go with Klaus, but she can come back and pack her things before he whisks her away this time; this time, she won't be a prisoner. For the most part.

"Elena?" John is sitting in the living room when she comes downstairs. "You going somewhere?"

She forces herself to smile. "It's senior prank night," she tells him. "I'm headed to school. I'll be back later." She walks out of the house and doesn't look back.

She doesn't listen to music as she drives, but she looks through her car before getting out into the parking lot; she doubts Klaus will trust her to drive herself anywhere.

She hates that she slips back into thinking this way so easily.

 _Where are you_? she texts Caroline.

 _The gym_ , says the reply, and so Elena steels herself and heads there. She stands outside the doors for a few seconds, taking steady breaths until she feels her heartbeat slow a bit, and then she walks in.

Tyler is lying on the floor; Caroline is crouched over him, shaking. She walks toward them, measuring her steps.

"Ah, sweetheart!"

The hairs on Elena's neck prick up at the sound of his voice; she wants to jump three feet in the air, but she stays still as Klaus appears next to her, snaking his hand around her waist and pressing a possessive kiss to her hair. She doesn't look at him; she keeps her eyes fixed on Tyler. Klaus keeps a hold on her, and she stays still; she's terrified his hand will get to close to her stomach and he'll feel something she's not ready for him to know about just yet.

"You're turning him," she says.

Klaus laughs. "Come on, love, no need to be so serious all the time. It's polite to exchange pleasantries. For example: how's your summer been? You had a birthday, didn't you?" He steps back but keeps a hold on her arm, and looks her up and down. "Congratulations, sweetheart," he says, and his voice is dark, now. "You managed to make it to adulthood."

Caroline makes a choked little sound. Seconds later, Tyler's eyes snap open, and he gasps for breath.

"Right!" says Klaus, and he lets go of her. "Back on schedule. As you've probably surmised by now, I've been trying to make myself some hybrids, but unfortunately they've all died horribly. Something tells me it comes back to the fact that you're still alive. Now, I was–"

"He needs my blood," Elena says, cutting him off.

Klaus blinks, and looks taken aback. "What?"

"He needs to drink the blood of the doppelganger to complete transition," she says, and she hears Caroline pipe up in the background, _Elena_ –

"And how would you know that?" asks Klaus.

"I learned that when I was dead," she says. She can already tell this is going to make Klaus angry.

"You failed to share that when I saw you last," he tells her, and his voice is amused in that terrible, dangerous way.

"I had a lot to process that day," she tells him. He smiles, and she can tell his anger has been alleviated by that, the acknowledgment of both his biggest victory– the sacrifice– and then their sleeping together. She holds her hand up to his mouth, palm up. "I'm telling you now."

His eyes darken, and he grabs her wrist and holds her hand in place as he bites into it. He doesn't break eye contact the entire time.

She takes a few steps over to Tyler, and kneels next to him.

"Elena," he says. He sounds as scared as she's ever heard him. "Elena, I don't understand what's happening–"

"You're transitioning into a hybrid," she tells him, keeping her voice level, knowing Klaus will only stand her explanation for so long. "Half-werewolf, half-vampire. You need to drink my blood to survive."

Caroline whimpers. "Tyler, you don't have to–"

Elena bites her lip. "You don't really have a choice."

Tyler's breathing is speeding up. "I don't – I don't understand–"

She wants to feel terrible for Tyler, but she can't let herself do that, not now that Klaus is here again and she's playing this game _again._ "Tyler, look. Klaus is a few seconds away from shoving my hand against your mouth until you choke on my blood."

"You know me so well, sweetheart," says Klaus.

Elena ignores him. "Please," she says to Tyler, trying to say _I'm sorry_ with her eyes. "Do this the easy way."

Tyler's lips tremble, but he nods, and she brings her hand to his lips, pressing the wound to his mouth and watching her blood trickle down into his throat. After a few moments, Tyler swallows.

Klaus grabs her and pulls her away just as Tyler starts to convulse; he keeps a tight grip on her and holds her in place behind him, watching Tyler with what she imagines to be concerned fascination. Caroline gasps but backs away. After a moment, Tyler, crouched on all fours by now, throws back his head. His eyes are yellow and his mouth is fanged, and veins travel down his face, just beneath his skin.

"Well, that's a good sign," says Klaus.

Caroline is crying; Tyler is still gasping for breath; Elena hears the doors swing open, and she and Klaus turn around. Bonnie and Matt walk in, a blonde girl Elena doesn't recognize behind them, and then… Stefan.

Bonnie gasps when she sees her. "Elena, no–"

"It's alright, sweetheart," says Klaus, walking forward. He doesn't let go of Elena's arm, so she walks with him, matching his pace so he isn't dragging her. "Elena here knew the answer the whole time. It's all sorted, now." Bonnie and Matt have stopped moving, but the blonde girl walks forward at full speed. "Elena, love," says Klaus, "I'd like you to meet my sister, Rebekah."

"Ugh, a doppelganger," says Rebekah, so quick it sounds like a reflex, and then she pauses. "You're the girl Stefan loves," she says, her voice dark. She turns back to where Stefan is standing, in the corner of the room, making a point of avoiding eye contact with Elena just as Elena's avoiding looking at him. "Isn't she?"

"Jealous, are we?" says Klaus. Elena looks up at him; he's the one who looks jealous, she thinks, glaring over at Stefan like he's re-evaluating everything about him. His grip on her arm is a bit tighter, too.

She wants to scream. She isn't going to get together with Stefan again, she isn't going to declare her love for him, she isn't even going to look at him, because she knows Klaus, and he's nothing if not possessive and violent and willing to burn down everything he wants to keep someone else from getting it. She can do all of that, make all the right choices, and Klaus can still stand there looking like he's contemplating murder. It's not fair.

It's the most childish thought in the world– nothing in the world has been fair to her since her parents died – but it's infuriating.

She can't do anything about it, but she can do damage control; it might be what she does best, where Klaus is concerned. She leans into his grip, just a little, not enough to be obvious. She turns her body towards him so Stefan is little more than a blur in her peripheral vision, and tilts her head up towards his. She doesn't touch him, but she's angled herself so that she's closer to him, so that she could almost be leaning into him, and it puts her in a vulnerable position and him in what almost looks like a protective position, and then she darts a glance over her shoulder to Rebekah, which puts Klaus's mouth right next to her ear. It's the exact sort of position he's dragged her into countless times. They both know it. She doesn't think Klaus knows it's deliberate, though, and that's what she's counting on.

She can feel that Klaus is grinning without looking at his face, from the way his body relaxes, from the way he draws her nearer with a lazy pull, his hand moving from gripping her elbow to encircling her wrist. "Very well, then," he says. "Stefan, mate, grab my hybrid and get him into my–"

"No!" says Caroline, darting forward.

Elena leans even closer into Klaus so that it would be way too inconvenient for him to find a way to backhand Caroline without hitting her, and then, in an even voice, she says, "Let Tyler stay here, Klaus." Klaus looks down at her, as though surprised she'd even suggest it, and she raises her chin. "Let Stefan go. Let them all go. Let them all stay here. Please."

Neither of them need to state the fact that she's going with him; it's far too obvious.

Klaus laughs. "Elena, sweetheart, I need your blood to create hybrids, and in exchange you and your friend Tyler are getting your lives. I hardly think you can negotiate anything more with that."

She swallows, returning his gaze. "I have something else."

Klaus's lips quirk up into a smirk. "Do you, now?"

She isn't going to say it here; not in front of everyone, especially not in front of Stefan. Whatever is between her and Klaus, it works because it lives in shadows; she can't put it on display for everyone she knows. On top of that, she knows that Klaus wouldn't want to find out when people were around to see him react.

"Let's not do this here," she says, and steps back from him, gentle enough that he loosens his grip. She holds his gaze longer than she needs to as she turns around, and then she walks toward the door, not looking back. She knows he'll follow her.

Klaus's voice is almost jovial. "If any of you have left this room by the time I come back, I will kill you. And any family you've got, of course." Then he's next to her, pushing open the door. She walks through it.

He lets her lead them into a classroom before he rounds on her, pinning her against a wall without even laying a finger on her. His body is so close to hers –closer than he knows, since her stomach is still hidden under a flutter of cotton – and she can feel his breath hot against her ear. "So what is it, love?" he asks, hands against the wall between her arms and her sides. His fingers brush against her waist, moving so slow, touch so light. "Do you think that _this_ is enough to–"

His fingers land on her stomach, and they both go still. Elena stops breathing. At first, she doesn't think he realizes what it means; he hadn't realized that that was where her waistline was – but his hand splays out against her stomach, the pressure of his palm familiar and alien all at once, and he's leaning even closer to her so that their legs are pressed together.

"Oh," he says, in a low tone she's never heard before. "You were right, sweetheart; this is something else."

She doesn't respond.

"So who was it?" he asks, his tone wicked and cruel, which means he's probably jealous. "The quarterback? My new hybrid? Don't tell me you were with the teacher–"

"Klaus, stop," she says. "It's not– I haven't–" She can't say it. She's tried to imagine this conversation a thousand times, and here they are, and she can't say it. "I didn't," she says, and it's not even a sentence but now his face is so close to hers they're almost kissing and her heart is racing so fast there's no way he doesn't hear it and there's no possible way for him to figure it out but she knows the very second he does.

There's not even a hint of amusement in his voice when he speaks. "You know that's impossible, don't you? What kind of simple-minded fool do you take me for?"

"Of course I know it's impossible," she spits back at him. "But it's either that or immaculate conception, and I don't know about you, but–"

"Why are you lying to me?" he says. "I thought you knew better–"

"Why would I lie about this?" She can barely keep her voice a whisper. "This – you're going to want doppelganger blood to make hybrids until the end of time and this –" She can't say _baby_. "This is the bloodline it's gonna come from," she settles on. "You'd make sure it was born and protected even if the father was some scumbag one night stand. What reason would I have to lie to you?"

Klaus doesn't say anything, just gathers her dress in his hands and presses it back from her stomach, holding the extra fabric behind her, so that the bump is unmistakeable. She arches her back so the bump is even more obvious, and he lets go of the dress to spread both of his palms over her stomach, as though he can somehow sense whether it's his through touch.

She's had sex with Klaus, but somehow this is much, much more intimate.

"How?" he says at last. He believes her, then; she doesn't know why. Maybe it's a remainder of the strange trust they built the previous April, the reward she gets for making a point of not lying to him.

"I don't know," she says. "You're the only hybrid – until twenty minutes ago, I mean – nobody knows the rules. Maybe they're different."

"Perhaps," says Klaus. He's silent for a moment. "Do you know what it is?" he asks.

"No," she says. "Not for another week or so, I think – it was May 2nd."

"Four months," he breathes, and presses his forehead against hers. "Almost exactly. When did you find out?"

"When I missed my period," she says. "A few weeks after."

"And I only find out now?"

She could throw out some bull about how the first trimester is risky, but they'd both know she was lying. "I wasn't ready," she admits. "I was scared. I wasn't– I wasn't even eighteen when I found out." It's more honest than she'd planned on. Then, for his benefit, she throws in, "And I knew you'd be back."

Klaus smiles at that, just like she expected. She knows exactly what she has to say.

"Klaus, I don't want this to have to be a negotiation," she says, and places her hands over his, still pressed against her stomach. It's a tender motion, which means her words have to be pragmatic and direct, or else he'll be uncomfortable or she'll have given too much ground or everything will fall apart. "I'm pregnant. It's yours. Whatever you have in mind, whether it's road-tripping around the continent making hybrids or getting on a plane to god-knows-where, I'm going to get more and more and more pregnant and then I'm going to give birth." She hasn't even let herself really think about that, yet, and this isn't the time to do so. She pushes forward. "I don't want my ex-boyfriend along for the ride. I don't want my best friend's boyfriend hanging around. I get that he's your first hybrid, and I get that Stefan's been your right-hand man this summer, okay? But I'm asking you to get where I'm coming from."

It's tricky with Klaus, to get it right; because his feelings for her aren't love, aren't anything soft and tender and giving, they're possessiveness and pride and ownership and desire and jealousy, they're dark and destructive and they burn like hellfire in his lungs and his head and the pit of her stomach, and making him feel vulnerable or weak is a sure way to get someone killed. The best way to work Klaus is to appeal to his sense of power, to his ego, and to do that by letting herself be just weak and vulnerable enough. Everything with Klaus is a game, and she knows this better than anyone; and if she makes sure he always wins then she doesn't ever have to lose.

She knows she got it right, though. She can feel it in his touch, in his breath against her hair.

He places a finger under her chin and lifts it, gently, and looks into her eyes. His are dangerous and delighted.

"Very well," he says, his voice a little louder than a whisper. "I'll let you have your way, sweetheart. You've certainly earned it."

He could mean the month in willing captivity, or her obedient walk to her death; he could mean her turning Tyler into a hybrid, her agreeing to spilling her blood whenever he asks for as long as he asks; he could mean it like a king on high, giving his queen his favour because she succeeded in conceiving his heir; he could mean all of the above, or none of it. It doesn't matter.

He leans forward and kisses her. It feels like a challenge, a dare, a means for her to prove herself. It's possessive and victorious and hot and she kisses him back like she's been waiting for this for months, because a part of her has, and she feels his same sense of victory coursing through her veins like a drug. She won. She spent months afraid and unsure, pregnant and lost, trying to figure out how to tell him, how to get what she wants, how to free Stefan and save her friends and ensure her safety and the fetus's safety and now she's done it, and the relief feels like sunlight breaking out on her skin. His hands pull her towards him by the waist, a little more gentle then he'd have been if she weren't pregnant, and she grips her fingers in his hair and pulls him closer. He steps forward, backing her against the wall, his knee pinned between her legs. She feels wanton, pressing herself against his leg in her history classroom – Klaus once taught a class in here, she remembers – he's hard against her leg, and he slips his hand between his knee and her underwear, under her dress, and her breath catches in her throat–

"Klaus, we can't, not here–" She gasps. "Everyone's in the gym–"

"They can wait." His voice is more like a growl.

"What if they don't?"

He pauses, and then pulls out his phone with the hand that isn't touching her clit. His finger moves against her and she squirms; he grins at her.

"Stefan, mate," he says, and she realizes that he's going to fucking _finger_ her while talking on the phone with her ex. "Turns out Elena did have something to negotiate with." She's trying so hard not to rock her hips against his touch like the desperate teenager she is. "You can let everyone go on home now." She starts to whimper and then catches herself, realizing that Stefan has vampire hearing; Klaus looks at her and she knows he had the same thought.

He puts the phone on speaker.

"Should I come meet you, then?" Stefan asks, and panic rises in Elena.

"Actually, I've some good news for you," says Klaus. "You're going to be staying in Mystic Falls for a while. Keeping an eye on my new hybrid, and all of that." He slips a finger inside her, and she bites her lip so hard it hurts and clenches her hand into a fist in his shirt. "You can head on back to your family home as well, now."

"And what about Elena?" Stefan asks.

Klaus grins at her. "Elena's going to join me on a little trip," he says.

Stefan is quiet for a long time. By the time he speaks again, Klaus has two fingers inside Elena and she's buried her face in his chest to muffle her moans. "What should I tell her family?"

Elena swallows. "I'll be coming by later to pack up some stuff," she says before Klaus can say anything, and she thinks she keeps her voice even as she speaks.

Klaus's gaze is blazing. "You heard the lady," he says, and he sounds cheerful. "I'll be in touch." He hangs up, and Elena gasps loudly as his fingers crook inside her. "So," he says, and pauses like he's waiting for her to explain but his fingers keep moving, and–

"This isn't going to be like last time," she manages to get out, and then whimpers, and then, focusing so hard on making her voice forceful. "I'm going to pack some clothes."

"Why?" Klaus asks. "I'll buy you whatever you need. You'll have outgrown everything you own soon enough, anyhow."

Elena grits her teeth. "I'm going to be the mother of your child," she says, and the truth of it startles both of them. "I'm going to pack my things because I _want_ to."

"You want a lot of things, don't you?" Klaus asks, his mouth right next to her ear, and his voice is low but not threatening and his breath sends shivers down her neck.

"Don't you?" she asks in return, her voice little more than a moan.

He pulls out his fingers, and Elena is almost shameless enough to press herself against his leg, but then he hooks his fingers around the waistband of her underwear and tugs them down. She wriggles her hips a little, and then he pulls away his knee and they fall straight down her legs and onto the floor. His hand ghosts along the back of her leg to her knee and then pulls her leg up around his waist and she lets him, leans all her weight onto him so she isn't even touching the wall, and then they're not against the wall but he's sitting her down on a desk. His mouth travels down her neck. She tries to work the button and zipper of his jeans with one hand for a moment, and then she decides to pull off his shirt instead. She throws it to the ground once he helps her get it off, and then he lays her down along the desk, his hands traveling up her body and resting on her naked stomach.

"This is Alaric's desk," she says, even though it's the most ridiculous thing she could say.

"Fitting, then, isn't it?" is all he says.

She doesn't think Klaus has it in him to be gentle, but this isn't rough like last time was, even though this time they're fucking on a desk in her high school and last time they'd been in a king bed. Maybe it's because no one's trying to prove anything, this time; this isn't an ending, this is – god, this is the beginning of – she doesn't want to stress out about what's to come, not right now, not when she has Klaus right where she wants him and when everything is going her way, not at three in the morning on the day she was supposed to start her senior year, not when their hips are rocking against each other and her nails are digging into his back and she can tell herself, just for a moment, just while she's distracted enough to believe it, that everything might be okay.


	13. i am the resurrection and the life

She should feel horribly guilty that she just had sex on Alaric's desk hours before the first day of school, but she doesn't, really. She lies on top of Klaus and fades in and out of sleep for maybe a couple of hours, because she's exhausted from the force of her relief and because pregnant sex is pretty damn tiring, and he lets her, she presumes, because she's pregnant with his kid and he's high on all the things going right in his life.

She wakes up for real when the sun pierces through the blinds, and freaks out about the fact that there are going to be students in here in a few hours long enough that Klaus rolls his eyes and goes off to compel a janitor. She's deliberating putting her underwear back on, even though she doesn't want to, but Klaus makes the decision for her by throwing them in the trash as soon as he gets back. She goes to the gym showers for a quick rinse, because she doesn't want to smell like sex when she goes to her house, and Klaus leaves her in peace but has a look in his eye that makes her think he'll be taking shower size into consideration choosing hotels going forward.

She calls Jeremy from the passenger seat of Klaus's car. It's similar to the one he was driving in April, but she thinks it might be a more recent model, or that he'd had extra work done on it. She rolls down her window and watches her town go by.

"Elena!" he exclaims when he picks up. "Oh thank god, I was so worried–"

"I'm fine, Jer," she says, and it's true, for the most part. She's physically safe, and Klaus is acquiescing to her request. "I'm on my way to the house now."

"To pack," says Jeremy, bitterness clear in his voice. "Stefan told me. Elena, why–"

"We'll all talk when I get there," she promises. She really doesn't want to have this conversation with Klaus listening in.

When Klaus pulls up in front of her house, she convinces him to go do–well, anything, really–and pick her up in an hour. She waits to see him drive off, then pushes open the door, and, of course, her whole family is sitting in the living room.

"Hi," she says, feeling like she's just done a walk of shame. She lowers her bag to the floor and takes a breath.

"Elena, what is going on?" asks John, leading the conversation as always. "Is Klaus back?"

"Yeah," she says, and in that moment the whole weight of it sinks in on her: the fact that her entire future, everything she ever wanted out of life, is gone.

"Did you know this when I asked you where you were going this morning?" he asks.

"Of course," she tells him, and walks over to sink down in an armchair. She's too tired and has too much to think about to be delicate.

"Why did you lie about it?" He's sitting forward on the couch, and his words are not quite accusatory but coming close to it. She so does not have the energy for an argument, but it looks like she might not have a choice.

"Because you would have stopped me, and I knew I had to go."

"You _had_ to go?" John asks.

"Yes, I _had_ to go," she says, throwing the words at him with more resentment than she'd intended. "Tyler would have died if I hadn't gone. He was holding my friends hostage, holding uninvolved students hostage, what the hell else was I going to do?" She swallows. "And he would have come here, whenever he was done at school, or sent someone to bring me, so it doesn't make any difference."

"Elena–" Jenna says, and then John interrupts her – that's what makes Elena angry.

"Elena, I understand you want to help your friends, but you had no idea what he was going to do. You can't–"

"You don't get to tell me what I can't do," Elena tells him. "And yes, I did know how he was going to react. You don't know the first thing about how Klaus works, but that doesn't mean I don't."

John's jaw tenses. "You can't honestly expect me to just let Klaus take you again."

Elena rubs her temple. "John, can we please not do this?"

"Stefan said you were coming by to pack your things," Jeremy says. "You're going with him again, aren't you?"

Elena takes a deep breath. "Of course I am, I was always going to, this was always the way it was going to go–"

"Or so you assumed," John cuts in.

"Did you really think there was another way this was going to go?" Elena asks, raising her voice. "When I told you I was pregnant and that I couldn't get an abortion, was the 'because Klaus will find out' not made clear enough? When I told you that Klaus had chased Katherine around the world for five hundred years, did it not occur to you that there was no way I could survive the sacrifice and he would just leave me alone?"

"This can't happen again, Elena," Jeremy says. "We aren't going to let it happen all over again, we'll–"

"So what?" she asks. "Would you trade all of our lives for my freedom from Klaus?" She's speaking to all of them, but then her eyes meet John's and she stares just at him. "Would you, John? Because, I mean, you're my father, maybe you know best, so if you would, you should tell me before I walk out of that door in an hour and make the opposite trade."

John looks up at her, sad, helpless, and, as always, just a little bitter. "There has to be another way," he says.

"Don't you get it?" she asks, and rises to her feet. "I am sick and tired of another way. I'm–" she stops, swallows, takes a breath. "I have been fighting for all of our lives for so long," she says, her voice small. She sits back down. "And now I don't have to anymore. Please don't ask me to."

"So you're just going to give up?" Jeremy asks.

Elena turns and looks at him. "I gave up my life last year to keep you safe," she says to him.

"Yeah, and you survived, you got another chance! Don't you want to–"

"I don't want to fight anymore, Jer," she says, her voice so quiet. "I'm going to have a baby."

No one speaks for a long moment.

"It's not fair," Jeremy says, voice just as low.

"What isn't fair is that I have to spend my last hour fighting with my family before I go off with Klaus for quite possibly the rest of my life!" she says.

Jeremy's eyes widen – Elena feels bad, for a moment, but she can't handle guilt on top of everything else so pushes it aside.

"The rest of your–"

"I can't deal with this," she says, and stands, because she's too restless to sit still right now. "I – seriously, Jer? Yes, the rest of… god, how do none of you get it?" She runs a hand through her hair. "He needs my blood to create his hybrid army, he will always need my blood to create his hybrid army, but before that, I am giving birth to his _freaking_ child in five months–" her voice catches in her throat "–and then I am going to be a mother, and I just, I just can't, I mean, what do you expect me to do? What am I–what do you think I'm going to fight? I can't–I don't even–" She places a hand over her mouth, and takes a long, shuddering breath. "I can't _think_ about anything else," she says. "I can't–I can't manage all of that and also have to worry about all of you ruining everything and getting yourselves killed, I can't–" She blinks back tears and swallows. "Klaus is coming back in less than an hour," she says, "and if you guys can manage to be civil, I might even be able to get you visiting privileges, but you just… you just need to stop."

She collapses back on the armchair, spent, holding her hand over her eyes, and takes long breaths. Nobody speaks. Finally, she pushes her hair out of her face and sighs. "I need coffee," she says.

"I'll put on a pot," says Jenna, and jumps up. Elena thinks she's glad to have something to do. She heads up to her room, and looks around, taking it all in; then she grabs a suitcase from her closet and opens it up on her bed. She wants her favourite leather jacket. She wants the original copy of Wuthering Heights Stefan gave her last year, she wants – the picture of herself with her parents she keeps in her mirror. She doesn't want her diaries. She doesn't want Klaus near them.

She takes fifteen minutes to pack, to say goodbye to her room, and then she heads back downstairs. She leaves her suitcase at the top of the stairs; the doctor told her not to lift heavy things during pregnancy, and if, god forbid, she slipped or stumbled or hurt herself, Klaus would be furious.

(She hopes someone else carries it down before Klaus shows up; she doesn't want the inevitable _invite me in_ conflict to mess everything up.)

She sits in the kitchen and drinks coffee with Jenna, and John brings her bag down the stairs. Jeremy asks to draw her, and she poses for his sketch. She thinks she should be pretending to be light and cheerful, but she's too tired, and as much as she hates it a part of her is looking forward to being alone with Klaus, to not having to worry about anything but keeping him happy, to being able to just lie in bed or read and not having to take care of everyone at once. She wonders what it would be like if she were just another pregnant teenager, with options and choices for how to go forward.

She doesn't want to think about that. She goes upstairs and changes into a new dress.

When Klaus arrives, John wheels her suitcase to the door for her and she steps right outside to meet him. He doesn't insist on being invited in – he does kiss her, briefly, clearly more to claim his territory than anything else. He grabs her suitcase and loads it into the trunk of the car while she hugs her family, and then he holds open her door and she gets in the car. She doesn't look back when they drive off; she fiddles with the radio until she's found the classical station, and then closes her eyes and tries to sleep.

. . .

They fuck all over the hotel room, which she'd expected, really; the moment the bellboy has disappeared around the corner Klaus is closing the door behind him and Elena is pulling his face to hers, stumbling backwards toward the bathroom, wrapping her leg around his waist, gasping at the stroking of his thumb at the inside of her knee. They fuck in the shower and in the jacuzzi and on the bathroom sink the first day, and it's like some weird honeymoon phase of whatever this is. Klaus is still high on all his recent victories, and Elena is relishing in the fact that she doesn't have the sacrifice hanging over her head and, okay, maybe sex is a great way to not worry about what's got to be going on at home. It's strange, being back to sharing a hotel room with Klaus, something that's in some ways so familiar and in other ways so, so different.

They share a bed, which is maybe the weirdest part of it all; it's such a domestic thing, and such a stark change from the month she'd lived with Klaus in the spring. Even going to sleep, Klaus is still Klaus; the weight of his hand on her back while she lays her head on his chest isn't tender or loving, it's possessive and satisfied, and she doesn't really mind because she's got a million things on her mind as well, not one of which is romantic or sweet. They're lying in bed together, but it's not _cuddling_ ; if anything, she feels like an accessory, like a symbol of power Klaus is holding that just happens to have a heartbeat. Still, it's sort of nice; it's scary, of course, because she's resting her head on the most dangerous and vicious monster in the world and the arm he's got around her is strong enough to pin her next to him forever and crush her to pieces if he was so inclined, but it's kind of nice. She's too used to Klaus holding onto her like he owns her. She can remember hearing warnings, when she was younger, about guys who were moody and controlling and jealous and overprotective, and she knows that this is the very worst possible version of that.

There's nothing she can do about it, though. It is what it is.

She tilts her head up towards him, her hair falling further down her naked back until the tips of it brush his fingers at her hip. "What do you want it to be?" she asks. She tries to sound light and casual, a little sleepy, as though this is a passing thought in a half-dazed mind, and not a careful question she's lost sleep over for weeks. _What if he wants a boy and it's a girl? What if he wants a girl and it's a boy? What if he doesn't want it around and sends it away? What if he wants it around and it_ doesn't _get sent away?_

She doesn't want to worry about these things until she has to, but now Klaus knows and she's back with him; she can't just be concerned about carrying a baby to term.

She doesn't want to think about what would happen if she miscarried.

"What do you mean?" he asks, sounding genuinely perplexed. He lifts his hand from her waist to stroke it through her hair; his touch is strangely gentle.

"The baby," she says. It's harder than it should be to get out that word. "Do you want it to be a boy or a girl?"

Klaus blinks, and then gives her an indulgent, lazy smile. "Oh, whichever, I suppose," he says.

"Hmm," she says, trying not to show her relief. For all that Klaus is monstrous, he isn't some medieval king obsessed with his child's gender– but this is Klaus. There's no telling what might make him furious.

"Do you have a preference?" he asks her, still stroking her hair.

She rests her chin against his chest. "I don't know," she says, honestly. "We'll find out soon enough."

His hand pauses above the crown of her head.

"How soon?"

Elena bites her lip. "Next week, I think."

"I'm sure I could find a witch who could tell you now," says Klaus. She's thrown off for a moment, and then she realizes why Klaus's voice is so harsh; he's offering her something for no benefit but her own. He doesn't care about the gender; he might go through the trouble because she cares.

It wouldn't be much trouble to go through, she knows; he's not offering to take down kingdoms for her (although she bets he'd sound much more comfortable offering that, crowning himself king and making her into little more than an object), but it's enough to make him uncomfortable.

She smiles. "Do you think we should find out now?" she asks. She hopes it's the right move, giving him back the power, the authority, the decision.

After a moment, he starts stroking her hair again; it must have been the right move. "I don't particularly care, love," he says.

"Then I can wait," she says. "Find out at the normal time." She lays her cheek against his chest, looking off in the direction of a painting on the hotel wall.

"Do you have a due date, love?" he asks, after a moment.

"January 23rd," she says, not moving her head, just laying there. "That's what the doctor said."

"January," he says, and she knows that he's just mulling on that, not waiting for a response. "You've still got quite a while left, haven't you?"

"I have to grow the baby before I can have it," she says, eyes closed, and Klaus laughs, so genuinely she can feel it reverberate in his chest.

"Yes, well, there is that," he says.

She says nothing at that, and just lies there, in the arms of the monster all the stories are about.

The next morning, over coffee, Klaus asks: "Where do you most want to travel?"

Elena pulls her soft grey robe tighter around her. "What do you mean?"

"Where do you want to go?" Klaus asks, voice patient. "I was thinking a week in Europe might be nice. You can still fly while pregnant, can't you?"

"Until the last few weeks, yeah," she answers, and swallows. "Is this a bribe or a reward?"

Klaus grins at her. "It's a gift," he says, which she takes to mean it's a reward. "Don't tell me you're turning it down. You've never been to Europe."

She thinks for a moment. "I don't know where I'd want to go," she says. "I can't exactly drink good wine or eat unpasteurized cheese, or–anything like that. I'm pregnant."

"You can't drink while pregnant these days?" he asks, with a bemused frown. "That's certainly changed since my mother was having children."

She's pretty sure Klaus has never mentioned his mother before; she rarely thinks about her, the witch named Esther who'd cursed her own children. It's still hard to imagine Klaus having a mother.

"Science," she says in reply.

"So, you can't drink," says Klaus. "I suppose we'll have to save France and Italy for after you've given birth."

"What's that going to look like?" she asks.

She'd intended on bringing that up much, much later, in some subtle fashion, but she can't help herself. It's a light comment, alluding to a future trip somewhere, except it's so loaded and so heavy; last time she'd been living with him, there could never have been mention of a future, because the whole point was that she was going to die. She's been thinking of this as something similar–a countdown until she gives birth–but of course she knows this is the rest of her life. He wants her blood and he wants her child–his child–their child, and he's going to keep her around for god knows how long.

"What are you talking about?" he asks.

"After I give birth," she says, forcing the words out in the calmest voice she can manage.

Klaus looks at her like she's gone mad. "Well, there'll be a baby, then."

"I'm not raising a baby in hotel rooms," she says, and she's immediately afraid of what he's going to answer, can almost hear him say _well, you won't be raising the baby_ , or something like that.

"Well, no, of course not," he says. "We'll take up residence in one of my homes soon enough; I'm growing tired of being on the road all the time." He cups Elena's chin in his hand. "Already eager for motherhood, are we?"

He'll want her to have more than one child, she realizes with sudden, blazing horror. He won't want to risk the doppelganger bloodline on one person. And she got pregnant the very first time they had sex.

She bites her lip to keep it from trembling.

Klaus notices. "Is something the matter?" he asks.

She steps back, rubs her eyes. "No, no, I'm fine," she says, and wraps her arms around herself. She doesn't think that's going to cut it. "I'm not – I feel kind of dizzy. I think I need to eat."

"Of course," says Klaus, and something changes in him, then. "What do you want? Shall I call up room service? Do you want to go to a restaurant?"

"Um," she replies, and rubs her eyes. She is really hungry, she realizes. "What city are we in?" She'd been asleep in the car.

"Washington," he replies. "Just for the day."

"Let's go out," she says. "I could use a walk."

She changes into a dress that makes her look especially pregnant, and pulls a light sweater over it, and then heads out. She doesn't spend ages worrying about how she looks, like last time. She doesn't have to.

"What do you want to eat?" Klaus asks.

She almost says "whatever you want," but then stops herself. She's pregnant. What _does_ she want? "I want eggs," she says, and she's surprised at how badly she does, and she thinks her surprise is in her voice. "Really, really bad. And bacon."

Klaus laughs, takes her to some upscale all-organic restaurant with an extensive breakfast menu, and yum, applewood-smoked bacon sounds perfect, and oh, they make eggs benny with crab, that sounds great, too. The waiter comes by, asks if they're interested in mimosas.

"She's pregnant," Klaus rebukes.

Elena feels a pang of sympathy for the poor waiter, and of annoyance at Klaus's lack of decorum. "Sorry," Elena says. "I'll just have a glass of orange juice, thanks."

Klaus wants a Bloody Mary. The waiter congratulates Elena and then heads off with their orders.

Klaus takes her to a small lake house in Pennsylvania for a few days – he calls it small, it's still twice the size of her family's lake house – and he has a few compelled staff members there to wait on her. He doesn't seem to have any business to disappear for, though; he's there more or less the entire time, eating lunch with her on the dock, asking her incessant questions about her pregnancy, delivering her a pile of books on pregnancy and infancy that she has to read.

"You know, you're the one who calls the shots around here," she tells him, leafing through some lists of foods to avoid during the second trimester. "You should read up on this too."

She doesn't think he'll take her seriously, but to her surprise, he pauses. "You have a point," he tells her, and without further ado picks up a book, sinks down on the couch next to her, and starts reading.

Five days later, Elena feels a fluttering in her stomach, something like butterflies. She's kneeling on the bed, halfway to getting up, and then she sits back down on her ankles and brings a hand to her stomach; it feels bigger, today, a _lot_ bigger, and she presses a hand against the stretching silk of her nightgown and knows exactly what she's feeling, just like that.

"Oh," she says, the word falling from her lips like a gasp.

Klaus reappears in the room, still shirtless, and takes her in. "What's happened?" he asks, voice terse, and she realizes what she must look like, keeled over on the bed with her hands around her now very, very obvious bump. "Did something–"

"The baby's kicking," she says, and looks up, meeting his eyes. "Sorry, I just – this is the first time." She swallows. She's felt pregnant, known she was pregnant, but she's never really felt like she's having a _baby_ until now, until she can feel it moving inside her stomach, can feel the clear pressure of tiny, tiny feet.

"Does it hurt?" Klaus asks. "Are you in pain?"

"No," says Elena. "It's too small to hurt. It's… light."

Klaus sinks down next to her on the bed, eyes fixed on her stomach. "You're bigger," he says.

Elena laughs, a choked little sound. "Yeah, I guess I popped," she says. "I'll need new clothes."

Klaus is still staring at her stomach, as though if he concentrates enough he'll develop x-ray vision. She sighs. "Here," she says, and takes his hand, guiding it to where she last felt the baby kick. His brow is furrowed in concentration. He doesn't look like a monster at all, right now.

The baby kicks again, and Klaus's eyes widen. "It isn't very strong," he says, after a moment.

"It's the size of an avocado," she says, and then frowns. "Or a pear. I can't remember which the doctor said it would be."

"Then why is your stomach so big?" Klaus asks.

Elena laughs again – the sound is shocked, but she can't help it, this is the monster who killed her and here he is as unknowing as a child. "It's not just floating around in my stomach," she says. "There are layers of protective, I don't know, walls and stuff keeping it safe."

Klaus looks a little disappointed. "It's hardly even an infant, then, is it?"

She feels a strange, defensive rush. "It has hands and feet," she says. "It can make a fist and suck its thumb. It has a brain."

Klaus is still frowning.

"I have an appointment in two days, remember?" she says. "You can see pictures then if you come."

"That's when you're finding out the gender," he says.

Elena nods. "Yeah," she says.

Klaus smirks at her, and now, at last, he seems more like himself. "You're not going to request I stay far away from the hospital?" he asks. "Not afraid I'll terrorize the pregnant population of Richmond?"

"You'd better come," Elena replies, feeling bold. "The doctor's been giving me judgmental looks for refusing to admit that I'm a single teenage mother for months. I need to prove I'm not in delusional."

Klaus laughs.

"You've been in Europe on business for months," she informs him.

"I can see why he wouldn't believe that," Klaus returns, grinning.

"Well," says Elena. "Let me have my petty moment of victory when I introduce you to him and see his face. I think I'm entitled to that much."

She thinks she's entitled to a lot more, but she'll never get to say those things, now.

They fly to Richmond two days later, and Klaus seems terribly out of place in the waiting room. "I could compel us into a private clinic," he says. "No wait time. Much nicer facilities."

"Changing OBGYN's this late in the game is bad for the health of the mother," she tells him, even though she's never actually read that anywhere and is just assuming. "The stress might be bad for the baby."

When her turn comes, the doctor greets her with the same kind, if slightly patronizing, expression as usual, and then turns to Klaus. "And this is?"

"The father," Elena tells her, and relishes the look on the doctor's face. "I told you, he was away on business over the summer, but he'd be back."

She'd always known the doctor didn't believe her, thought she was in denial that the father had left her, and she's sure that's not an uncommon thing for pregnant girls her age, but she still loves getting to prove the doctor wrong. If anything, this is the part about Klaus coming back she was most excited for.

"Right," says the doctor, and then he composes himself and extends a hand to Klaus. "Pleasure to meet you."

"Oh, the pleasure's mine," says Klaus, grinning. "Thank you so much for looking after my Elena while I've been away. I'm sorry I haven't been able to come to any other appointments."

The doctor raises an eyebrow at "my Elena" – and he's right to, it's unnerving and infantilizing and possessive, but that's Klaus, and that's Elena's life, from now on.

The doctor sets up the ultrasound, and Elena lies back on the hospital bed and bites her lip. There's nothing to be nervous about, except there's everything to be nervous about; that the doctor will find a deformity or problem with the fetus, or that Klaus will decide he doesn't approve of the baby's gender, or that – there's nothing to be nervous about. The fetus has been healthy so far, Klaus told her he doesn't care about the gender, and Elena's a doppelganger, so she's more or less designed to be a broodmare. Everything should be fine.

"Everything looks fine," says the doctor, and Elena exhales a breath she didn't know she was holding. "The fetus looks perfectly healthy, and you look right on track for your due date, maybe a few days ahead." The doctor points at the ultrasound picture, and Elena's heart does that strange skip it always does when she looks at the picture of her future child, the picture of Klaus's offspring, alive and moving inside of her. "Are you planning to find out the gender today?"

"Yes," says Elena, and then looks up at Klaus.

"Whatever you like," he says, sounding a little bored. She thinks – maybe this is just a hormonal thing, her wanting him to be invested – but she thinks he sounds like he does want to know the gender, if only to abate his curiosity.

The doctor consults the picture for a moment. "It looks like you're expecting a daughter," he says, and Elena's hand goes straight to her stomach despite the cold blue gel spread all over it. "Congratulations."

"A girl," Elena breathes, and looks down at her bump. She doesn't care, not really, beyond just wanting to know for the knowledge's sake, but for some reason she thinks the knowledge is going to make her cry – not because it matters, but because it's the first thing she's learned about this child, and she's going to be this child's _mother_ , and it's so silly and it shouldn't matter but she can't keep her breath from catching in her throat. "Hey there," she says, not even caring at the fact that she's being openly vulnerable in front of Klaus. She shoots a look up at the doctor. "And everything's alright?" she asks. "Heartbeat's all good? She's the right size?"

"She looks perfectly healthy," says the doctor, with an indulgent smile. "Everything looks just as it should be."

"Can I get a picture?" she asks. The doctor nods.

Later, in the car, Elena stares and stares at the picture, even though she can't make it out as well as she'd like. "Oh, I think that's her nose," she says, and points at a little squiggle on the black and white image. "It looks like my nose."

"You can't possible tell," Klaus tells her, but he sounds amused.

"Shhhh," Elena says to him. "Let me have my moment."

"Very well," Klaus says, as he turns onto the highway. "The child's healthy. I suppose I can't ask much more of you."

She darts a look over at him. "Are you okay with it being a girl?" she asks, and she knows he can hear her apprehensiveness. "You said–"

"A girl is perfectly fine," Klaus tells her, sounding as though he wants to seem exasperated but can't help but be amused. "I told you, I couldn't care less what the child is, as long as it's born and it comes out healthy."

Ten minutes or so later, Klaus pulls into a parking lot, and she realizes that this is definitely not the airport.

"Why are we going to a mall?" she asks.

Klaus fixes a smirk at her. "You wanted maternity clothes, right?"

He is pleased with the appointment, then. He isn't displeased at the idea of a girl. She shouldn't have been worried, but she couldn't help it.

Klaus sits in dressing room chairs with more patience than she would have expected. He wants to see everything she tries on – he doesn't comment, though there's a strange smile on his face whenever she's wearing something that makes her look particularly pregnant. She'd expected he'd want her to display the bump, like a trophy, but it still feels bizarre to walk out of the stores with bags and bags of dresses and skirts designed to show off her pregnancy. She's sure that's in part due to the fact that being eighteen and pregnant isn't something to brag about to the world, but then that's not how Klaus would think about this at all; her pregnancy is proof that he's not just a vampire but rather the exception to all the rules, that he's ensured the continuation of the doppelganger line, and it's a brand of ownership that she expects turns him on just to look at.

They go to the airport, then, and take another private plane.

"Where are we going now?" she asks.

He offers her a smile. "California," he tells her.

She blinks. "California?"

He smirks. "I told you we'd relocate to one of my properties soon," he tells her. "I own a secluded beach home in the Bay Area. You'll finish out your pregnancy there, and we'll fly back for your appointments, if you insist."

Elena swallows. "Why California?"

"Do you really think I didn't do any research?" Klaus asks, leaning towards her. "The child is due in February, which is widely agreed to be the riskiest month for children to be born, due to the dangers winter pregnancies and labors expose fetuses too. That said, hot summers are said to be particularly unpleasant for expecting mothers. A moderate climate should be safest for your pregnancy, and the availability of fresh fish and organic produce should provide great assistance to your nutritional needs."

Elena blinks. This she was not expecting – she'd thought Klaus would just do as he pleased, and she'd have to clue him in on the risks of whatever lifestyle he intended on her leading with him. Then again, perhaps after she'd told him she couldn't drink, he'd decided to learn a bit more. "You've thought about this a lot," she manages to say.

"You're carrying my heir," he reminds her, and places a hand over her stomach. "As well as the heir of the Petrova bloodline. As such, until you deliver my child, your health and safety is my primary concern."

"Thanks," she says, even though she feels more like a human incubator than ever.


	14. to me belongeth vengeance and recompense

The house he brings her to is enormous and stunning, of course, with a view unlike anything she's ever seen before. There's a sumptuous master bedroom with two walk-in closets – Klaus has already compelled staff to unpack her clothes into one of them – a massive library, a billiards room, an infinity pool, and at least a dozen guest bedrooms.

"You can choose which one to design a nursery in, if you like," Klaus tells her magnanimously.

She chooses a room overlooking the ocean, and throws herself into designing it – it's about the only thing Klaus will let her do, other than take supervised walks along the beach (exercise is important, so these are an every morning occurrence; she has an elliptical for rainy days, if she's in the mood, but since she's confined to Klaus's property, with the exception of the occasional restaurant outing, she likes to walk outside as often as possible.) He won't let her cook, not that she has the least bit of skill in that department; he has staff prepare her balanced meals. They also do her laundry, change the sheets, and clean the house. She's pretty sure Klaus doesn't really think she's too much of an invalid to do those simple tasks, though. He's just a snob.

A week after they arrive, a shipment of some sort comes in, which Klaus has carried into a storage space he then locks and tells her she isn't allowed to enter.

"What is this, some sort of Bluebeard scenario?" she asks, tone harsh.

Klaus laughs. "Bluebeard gave his wife a key to the forbidden room, didn't he?" he asks. He sounds amused, unconcerned, as though he doesn't realize that she isn't joking at all.

"I want to know what's in there," she tells him. He presses a kiss to her hair, and she pulls back.

"It's strict family business, sweetheart," he tells her. His voice is a little terse, but she isn't backing down, even though her heart speeds up.

"Well, I'm the mother of your child, aren't I?" she returns.

Klaus fixes her with a dark look. "That's enough, sweetheart," he tells her. "It's none of your business."

She holds his gaze for a long moment, heart racing, and refuses to look away.

"You're scaring me," she tells him. She's never said that to him before, not once, not when he spirited her away to a hotel room and she thought he was going to rape her, not when he snatched the phone out of her hand and threatened her family, not even when he sunk his fangs into her vein and drank until she died.

There's a power, she thinks, in the fact that she's withheld those words until now.

"Why won't you let this go, Elena?" he asks, taking a step towards her.

She holds her ground. "Because my daughter is going to live in this house, and I'm not exactly comfortable with there being a secret here so dangerous I can't even know what it is," she says.

Somehow, that sways him, and he opens the door to reveal a room full of coffins.

"It's my family," he tells her.

"Your family?" she repeats. She doesn't know enough about his family, but she knows that he has one, knows they're kept unconscious by mystical daggers. "You're planning to have a room full of starving original vampires underneath my daughter's nursery? Are you serious?"

"They pose no threat to the child," Klaus responds through gritted teeth. "They can't wake up of their own volition.

"But they could be woken up!" Elena says.

"None of my siblings would drink from an infant, even if they did wake up," Klaus returns. "Of that I'm confident."

"What about me?" Elena replies.

Klaus's jaw is tense. "You sleep in my bed, you're never out of my sight, you're perfectly safe if they do somehow rouse."

Elena just glares at him.

"I'll have a witch seal the room so that even if they wake, they can't escape," Klaus says, at last. "And they haven't been invited into the house, so if they do wake, they'll be more concerned with getting outside than with hurting anyone in it. Does that reassure you?"

Elena swallows. "Fine," she says. She knows it's as good as she's going to get.

The next morning, just because, she puts on a dress she knows will be too small, and asks Klaus to help her with the zipper. In the mirror, out of the corner of her eye, she can see his smirk when he realizes she's grown too big for it; he looks more delighted than makes any sense.

"This isn't going to do up, sweetheart," he says, and places a kiss against her jawbone.

Elena hums. "Oh, no. And I loved that dress."

"Well," says Klaus, and then kisses her again, a little closer to her mouth. "I don't see any need for you to be dressed at all."

"Klaus," she says, in mock horror, and turns around to face him. "That sounds like a line straight out of an HBO show."

He grins at her. "If anything, sweetheart, they're quoting me," he says, and then leans forward to kiss her proper. She tries to lose herself in the kiss, the light stubble around his chin, the searing heat of his lips against hers, of his breaths in her lungs, of his fingers brushing against her ribcage as he hastens to unzip the bottom of the dress and pull it down to her feet. It snags around her stomach a little before coming down, and Klaus's hands brush along her hipbone, just under the curve of her bump, sending shivers running up her spine.

Klaus has done far more than she expected, in terms of reading up on the baby; when they sleep together, he makes sure to position pillows right under the small of her back to keep her propped up, like the books say. The sex is still better than any she's ever had, which is unfair, in some ways, since Klaus has had centuries of practice, but she doesn't think it's just skill; there's something between them, something heightened by her pregnancy, maybe, something that makes her feel heady when he fixes her with _that_ gaze, something that sparks between them when they stand to close to one another, something that makes her feel wine drunk when he touches her.

She knows what chemistry is; she understands it, she's experienced it, but it's something different than she's ever known with Klaus. She remembers that one night in Montreal, her weight leaned against him, snow in her hair. His mouth is on her skin, his fingers digging into the underside of her knees, his hips rocking against hers, and she wonders if want can be passed through a bloodline; if the desire of doppelgangers past is rising in her throat, coursing through her veins, pooling in the pit of her stomach.

She desperately wishes she didn't want him, didn't want this, didn't wake up and think how glad she was that things had turned out like this; she wants righteous anger, she wants to be the party wronged, she wants to long for her family, but she doesn't. She misses them, she misses her family, but the weight of Mystic Falls seems lifted from her, somehow, and she doesn't even have to feel guilty because it isn't her fault that she isn't there.

It's awful. She doesn't want to be relieved by it.

A few days later, they take a trip into the city, and San Francisco is so different from anything Elena's ever seen that she falls in love with it on sight. They have lunch in a restaurant on top of a ritzy department store overlooking the city. Elena still isn't used to public outings while pregnant and it feels strange, having her pregnancy noticed, commented on. After lunch, they shop around a bit, though Elena finds she spends more time looking at baby clothes than she could ever have imagined.

"Is it okay to dress her in pink?" she muses, holding up an adorable dress with a poufy skirt. "I don't want to, like, force her into stereotypes, you know? I'm not trying to push the idea that girls wear pink and boys wear blue."

"Pink's an appropriate color for an infant," Klaus replies.

Elena sighs. "But what if she wants to be more of a tomboy?" she asks. "I don't want her to feel like she has to be a girly girl just because I think pink clothes are cute. Or a girl at all, I don't, I don't care. I want her to feel free to express herself however she chooses."

"Elena, she isn't even born yet," Klaus tells her with dry amusement. "She won't remember what you dress her in."

Elena frowns. "I definitely won't make the nursery pink, though. I'm leaning towards blue."

"I told you to do whatever you like with it," he responds.

Elena elbows him. "Just because I have veto power doesn't mean you can't care," she says. She means it as a joke, but she finds there's more truth to it than she even realized.

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Is that what you want?" he asks her. There's a strange edge to his voice. "For me to care?"

"I don't want my daughter to have daddy issues," she replies.

Klaus laughs. "Are you engaging me in a conversation about parenting?" he says, and then Elena finds herself cracking up because it's so surreal.

"Yeah, I think I are," Elena says, still giggling.

Klaus kisses her, and its like sunrise breaking out against her skin; she's so incredibly, stupidly happy, right in this moment, holding baby clothes in a department store, his closed mouth against hers, sharing a kiss of simple affection not intended to go anywhere further.

"Here's what I'll promise, sweetheart," he tells her, resting his forehead against hers. "I'll be a better father to our daughter than my father was to me."

Klaus has never really mentioned his father before, and it sobers Elena a little, even as she smiles up at him. It's not much of a promise, but there's more weight to it than any other empty words Klaus could have offered her.

"That'll do for now," she replies, and kisses him again.

They head to a museum called The Legion of Honor next, and to Elena it sounds like a military museum. When she says this to Klaus he acts offended. As a rule, Elena has always tried not to let on how much she likes museums around Klaus; at first, it was to avoid seeming too invested in anything around him, but now, there's no real reason for it. As usual, he brings her through the entire European Painting section, narrating everything he finds interesting, and she likes it, she does, but when they've reached the end of the section she drags him off in the direction of the Ancient Art signs.

He looks at her, curiosity in his gaze. "I didn't know you were so passionate about antiquity," he tells her.

"I wanted to be a writer, once," she returns. "I've always loved mythology." She pauses, and frowns. "Mythology unrelated to myself, I mean."

He laughs at that, but goes along happily enough. It's clear he doesn't care for ancient vases and ceramics and sculptures the way he does paintings, but Elena doesn't mind. Some of the artifacts have been preserved for thousands of years, and she wants to find the oldest one; she wants to see proof that there was a world spinning on long before vampires or doppelgangers, long before her fate was even a whisper in the predetermined abyss that is the universe.

Later that afternoon, they go up to the town Stanford is in to see the Cantor Arts Center, which has an amazing array of sculptures. Klaus tries to dive into a lecture about Rodin's work and how this is one of the largest collections outside Paris, but Elena really just wants a picture outside the Gates of Hell sculpture.

"This isn't even an original cast," Klaus says as he obliges her. "This is a reproduction of the cast in Paris."

"Then why does it say Rodin made it?" Elena asks.

"It's made from the same cast," Klaus tells her.

"Then it's basically the same thing," she says, and saunters off. "Besides, if we do go to Paris one day, I'll decide if the original is better for myself."

It still feels like a risky sentence, implying a planned future with him beyond just having and raising his child, but she figures she's entitled to a bit of probing.

"Well, that will have to wait until you can drink again, love," he tells her, throwing an arm over her shoulder. "French wine is not to be missed."

It's just Klaus, talking like a snob like he always does, but to Elena it feels like something of a promise.

They get into the car, and Klaus drives down to the Pacific Coast Highway, and then along it as it winds through mountains right next to the ocean, timed right at sunset. It's just stunning, and Klaus thought about it, thought about the timing of it all, even though he'd never admit it. They get dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Half-Moon Bay, and it's perfect, and it makes Elena want to laugh, Klaus planning a perfect date night.

She's happy. She shouldn't be, she doesn't want to be, but she is. The feeling isn't very familiar.

. . .

Their days are good, for the most part; they're happy enough. They've always enjoyed each other's company; now, there's no holding back or hang ups, and on top of that they're having great sex at least three times a week. It's not sweet, but Elena's had sweet; the girl who wanted nice boys and picket fences drowned in a river when she was sixteen, and the girl who wanted a prince charming and fantastical romance let herself be killed on a warm night under the full moon; the girl who wanted sweet is dead and gone. Elena doesn't know what she and Klaus are, but she feels like Matilda, at the end of the book, when her brain is finally being challenged to it's full capacity and she doesn't have psychic powers anymore; every conversation with Klaus has five different meanings wrapped into a few words, every action or decision is a game, a ploy; there is a part of her that has been fighting a war since the day she was born, and for so long it was fighting a war that didn't exist. Now it has a use, a place to go; now, it can fight to win.

Tatia told her that she was born to die and born to reproduce, but it doesn't feel to Elena like that's her destiny, these days; she also feels like she's destined to win. Maybe it's something that entered the family tree with Katherine. Victory is a drug she never wants to be weaned from; maybe it makes her a bad person, but after every real conversation with Klaus, the knowledge that she is smarter, more clever, more perceptive, a step ahead, it feels like it's what drives her heart to pump that sacred blood through her veins, like the fate she's lived and died for.

But there are days when Klaus is not the man, but the monster, and wolves run in packs.

The first day Klaus brings a group of werewolves over, Elena raises an eyebrow. "Oh, honey, you didn't tell me we were having dinner guests," she says, in the most saccharine voice she can muster. Klaus appears, laughing, wrapping an arm around her waist and pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

"Sweetheart," he says, with a lazy, indulgent grin, "you remember that bit of information you shared with me when we were reunited, don't you?"

She knows what he's referring to, but she decides to play dumb for the hell of it. "That I'm pregnant?" she asks, and bats her eyelashes up at him, a mockery of obliviousness.

Klaus laughs. "Try again," he tells her.

Elena fixes the group with a cautious look. "Wolves?" she asks. "Don't tell me you want me to open my veins and declare open season."

Klaus's chuckle resonates through from his chest to her back. "I was imagining something a slight bit more dignified, sweetheart," he says. "More medically-sanctioned, as well."

"And if I told you I wasn't in the mood?" she asks.

Klaus raises an eyebrow at her. "Sweetheart," he says.

There are fights worth picking, when it comes to Klaus, and this isn't one of them. "Only a little blood," she tells him, voice stern. "I am pregnant. Significant blood loss would be bad for the baby."

"Of course, love," Klaus says. "Never doubt my priorities."

It's not a daily occurrence, but it becomes a regular one, werewolves being brought to the house, often in the dead of night, in the middle of transitioning and in desperate need of Elena's blood. Elena collects small doses of her blood, a little bit at a time, at first into a blood bag and later just by cutting her finger and squeezing out what she can. She doesn't want to be dragged into Klaus's army building at a moment's notice, and she doesn't want to need to lose blood the more pregnant she gets. Still, she's never been a heavy sleeper and these days are no exception; every time Klaus brings transitioning hybrids to the house, Elena finds herself woken up, and usually ends up drinking tea in the living room while Klaus tests his weird mind control over his new hybrids.

They're innocent people; she doesn't know what any of them have done, but they're innocent of any crimes that could justify Klaus turning them and controlling them, and yet she doesn't care nearly as much as she once would have, or as she wishes she did.

"Tell me about your family," she says, one evening, when it's just them and they're sitting on the porch, a tumbler of bourbon in his hand and a cup of tea clasped in hers, her legs swung up to rest over his lap. They've both been reading; he has a copy of Dante's _Inferno_ in its original Italian balanced on her knees and her thumb is still holding her page in _The Picture of Dorian Gray._

"My family?" he asks, without looking up at her. "They're all in coffins in a sealed room about thirty feet away."

She places a hand over his page so he can't keep reading. "I'm serious," she says. "I know Elijah, and I met Rebekah, for a second, but… there are more of them, aren't there? You have more siblings, there were five coffins."

"Finn is the eldest," he tells her. "Well, eldest now, I had a sister older than him but she died of the plague before I was born. He's been in there for nine hundred years. Kol is younger than me but older than Rebekah. He's been in there for about a century. Rebekah was in her box for ninety years. Elijah hasn't spent much time daggered, in the big picture, but I'm sure he's resting comfortably now. Does that answer your question?"

It doesn't, but she has another question, now. "And the fifth?"

Klaus's returning smile is cruel, but the cruelty isn't directed at her, she thinks. "Not a sibling," he tells her.

"So who's in there, then?" she asks. "You said it was your family. Is it one of your parents?"

He narrows his eyes. "I don't think you want to keep up this line of questioning, Elena," he says.

"No," she replies. "No, god, don't you _threaten_ me. I live with you and I'm pregnant with your child, don't you dare start threatening me. You don't have to tell me, but don't try to scare me out of asking you questions."

"I threaten anyone I like," Klaus says.

"I'm not anyone." Elena leans forward, so that Klaus has to place a hand on his book to keep it from falling over. "I'm the key to making hybrids, I'm the mother of your child – children, maybe, depending on what the future holds – and you might have forever, but one way or another I'm in this – this _whatever_ this is – for life. You know I don't go around messing up your plans or plotting to kill you, I've proved it, so don't try to make me live the rest of my life in fear of you. I'm maybe the only person in the world you don't need to make scared of you."

"What's that meant to mean, then?" he asks.

She leans up, even closer to his face. "You don't need to frighten my loyalty out of me, or compel it out of me," she says. "You already have it. Don't go putting that in jeopardy."

She kisses him, long and slow, and then leans back and opens up her book again. Klaus grabs it from her, and she's about to protest, but then he hold her page with one thumb and flips through with another, until he's found whatever it is he's looking for.

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold," he quotes to her, his voice teasing and overly dramatic, mocking the words, the act of quoting them, and her, all at once. "The curves of your lips rewrite history."

It's all so ridiculous, except for the part of it, bigger than she thinks either of them would be willing to admit, that is perfectly and totally sincere.

Elena makes herself laugh. "I'm hardly Dorian Gray," she tells him.

He raises an eyebrow. "Aren't you?" he asks. "Exquisite beauty preserved long after it is meant to be, all due to a deal with the devil you never meant to make? A thousand years of sin without an etch of cruelty on that perfect face? I think it's more appropriate than you realize."

"I think you're reaching," she says, even though every quickened beat of her heart knows he isn't. "In fact, I think you're more of a Dorian than I am. Your sins are actually your own, and you're the one with eternal youth. And you're the one who accidentally made a deal with the devil when you became a vampire–"

"What are you talking about?" he asks. There's an edge to his voice – Elena swallows.

"Well, you were human once, weren't you?" she asks. She can't, she won't tell him about her conversation with Tatia, all those months ago; that belongs to her, that's hers and only hers. "And you're one of the original vampires. You couldn't have known what you were getting into when you first turned."

He stares at her for a moment longer, and she holds his gaze. Finally, he laughs. "You really are too perceptive for your own good, Elena," he tells her, as he returns to reading his book. "You're lucky I'm here to make sure it doesn't get you killed."

"Mmm," she replies.

Later that evening, when he isn't paying attention, she takes a pen and underlines the passage he'd quoted to her, just to be sure she remembers.


	15. now and at the hour of our death

She's already been asleep for hours by the time Klaus wakes her, face haggard.

"Klaus?" she asks, rubbing at her eyes. "Is everything okay?"

"Get dressed, sweetheart," he tells her, in a tone she's never heard from him before, somehow vulnerable and threatening and victorious all at once. "We're headed for Mystic Falls."

She sits up. "Wait, really?" she asks. "Why?" She looks over at the clock – it's one in the morning. Klaus doesn't mess with her sleep schedule, not with her being pregnant. "What's going on?"

"I've already had a bag packed for you, and the plane will be ready by the time we arrive at the tarmac," he says, and then throws a pair of jeans at her. "Get ready, I want to get going soon. I have a funeral to plan."

She catches the jeans. "I can dress myself, thanks," she says, and then yawns, and slides out of bed. "Whose funeral? What is going on?"

Klaus turns to face her, and there's a crazed grin on his face, the likes of which she's never seen. "My father," he tells her.

"What?" she asks. "Your – _what_?"

She knows the smallest amount about Klaus's father – that his name was Mikael, that he wasn't Klaus's biological father, obviously, hence the whole hybrid thing, that he'd hated Klaus and that Klaus had hated him, and that once upon a time the rest of Klaus's siblings had sided with Klaus against him.

"Back up," she says, as she stands and makes her way over to her dresser. She pulls off her nightgown and throws it in the hamper, and grabs a simple pink bra from her underwear shelf, doing it up with her back to Klaus even though he's seen it all before.

"Our good friend Stefan called to tell me that my father attacked and your dear teacher managed to dagger him," Klaus says.

Elena pulls a long-sleeved purple shirt on, sliding her hands along her stomach, still unaccustomed to the need for extra fabric. "And you believe him?" she asks.

"He put Rebekah on the phone to confirm," he tells her as she shimmies into her jeans. "And before you ask, yes, I'm certain your little friends are planning something, and I'm not entirely convinced, but if there's so much as a chance of spitting on my dear dad's desiccated corpse I can hardly pass it up."

"Okay, then," she says, brushing back her hair. Klaus is already waiting at the door for her; she grabs her phone and walks out with him.

She naps during the flight, curled up over two seats, with a wonderfully soft blanket draped over her. By the time they land, Klaus has already arranged an expensive rental car to meet them.

"So, sweetheart," Klaus says as they drive, "it looks like tonight is your high school's homecoming dance."

"Oh, yeah," she replies, rather than reflect on the fact that this was supposed to be her senior year and now she's a pregnant dropout.

"I've taken the liberty of sending some people ahead to arrange your closet, so be sure to choose something nice to wear," he continues. He shoots a grin at her. "I happen to prefer you in red, as you well know."

"We're going to homecoming?" she asks, ignoring his other comment.

"Certainly," Klaus tells her. "I happen to be fond of parties. Of course, I'll have to arrange a different venue; school gyms are terribly unsophisticated, don't you think?"

Part of her wants to go more than anything; part of her doesn't want the reminder of what she's missing; and part of her, the vain part of her, just doesn't want to be seen by her high school classmates while five months pregnant.

"What closet?" she asks.

"Ah," says Klaus. "Well, see, sweetheart, I decided it was worth having a house in your little town, considering the frequency of our visits to Virginia. There was nothing suitable, though, so I'm having it built. We'll stay there for a few days; I've a number of hybrids already on their way to protect the house."

Elena sighs, and shifts in her seat.

When she arrives at the house – which is a massive mansion with a huge, circular driveway and a ridiculous staircase – she's introduced to Klaus's legion of hybrids, and then she heads off to the master bedroom while Klaus goes off to attend to whatever he's up to.

She calls Jenna, makes plans to see her family the next day (Klaus had made it very clear that she wasn't to go anywhere on her own until he'd confirmed that Mikael was dead), orders a pizza since Klaus isn't there to judge the nutritional value of her meals (one of the hybrids answers the door in her place, since she's not allowed), and, after eating five slices, starts getting ready for homecoming.

She straightens her hair until it's as shiny as it gets, does her makeup so she still looks like herself, but with a little more mascara, more lip-gloss than she would have used before all of this. She chooses a red polyester dress with a deep sweetheart neckline and a skirt that flares out; her pregnancy is clear, but she still looks slender in it, and that shouldn't matter to her as much as it does today.

Klaus gives her an approving look when he comes back to collect her.

"Where did you relocate the dance to, then?" she asks, trying to ignore the pounding of her heart, now that she's minutes away from seeing her friends again for the first time in over a month.

"Ah, that," says Klaus, and opens the car door for her. "Your friend Tyler was kind enough to volunteer his family home."

When they pull up to the mansion, they're the first ones there; she guesses Klaus wanted to get the lay of the land before other people started filing in. Klaus offers her his arm and she takes it begrudgingly, and then they walk into the house. Klaus has already been invited in, she notes.

"Elena!" And there's Tyler, grinning, looking so much better than the last time she saw him, convulsing on the floor of the gym – god, Tyler, she didn't realize how much she'd missed even him. "Wow," he says, "you look–"

"–Pregnant?" she supplies. The look of uncertainly on his face makes her laugh, and at that, he smiles again.

"Yeah," he breathes out. "And great, too. You look really good."

"It's good to see you, Ty," she says, and steps out of Klaus's grip to hug him. Tyler returns the embrace, and then darts back, with a cautious look down at her stomach.

She giggles; she doesn't remember the last time she laughed with this much ease. "You won't break it," she tells him, and the relief is clear on his face as he leans back into the hug.

He doesn't seem to be quite himself, but she knows by now that something changes in Klaus's hybrids – siring, she remembers him calling it – and seeing as she's practically married to Klaus, she's not going to call him out on it, or judge him. She's sure he gets enough of that from her friends as it is.

God, her friends.

She stays out of the way as people start arriving. There are hybrids and compelled vampires everywhere, bodyguards hidden in plain sight, and Klaus is gone doing whatever the hell he's doing tonight. She sticks by Tyler, not wanting to be alone and not wanting to talk to old cheerleading teammates or lab partners about the current state of her life, and Tyler's more happy and energetic than she remembers him being, well, ever, if she's honest. It's refreshing; there's a selfish part of her that wishes Klaus had him hang out around the house, or visit them in California, just for a chance of company and a friendly face.

At one point, he disappears to get more beer ("would you like one?" he asks, and she laughs and replies "pregnant, remember?"), and she's only alone for a moment before Klaus materializes next to her.

"Mulling about inside, sweetheart?" he says, and grabs her hand, pulling her so she steps to the beat in a paltry imitation of a dance. "You're missing the party."

"You mean the wake?" she asks, and he laughs.

"I thought you'd relish the opportunity to revel in another quintessential high school experience," he says, and then grins, the expression a little mean, "considering you've missed out on so many."

She offers him a wry smile. "Turns out house parties lose their appeal when beer and keg stands are both out of the equation."

"Well, there is that," he says. "Still. Right shame, you being cooped up in here when you're looking like that."

She rolls her eyes. "Boo hoo," she replies.

He brushes a hand over her stomach, and then heads back out to the party. She supposes he has more people to threaten.

"How did he manage to throw a better party than me so quickly?" she hears, in what is unmistakably Caroline's voice, and she takes a deep breath in, swallows, and then turns around.

"Caroline," she says, and crosses the room over to where Caroline and Bonnie have just walked in.

Caroline blinks in surprise. "Elena?" she says. "Oh my god, I didn't know you were going to be here!" She wraps Elena in a hug, and then looks down when she feels Elena's stomach.

"I didn't know either," Elena says, with a gentle smile, trying to jump into the conversation before she gets questioned. She hugs Bonnie, and tries not to cry; she hadn't realized her friends had specific smells until last spring, when she'd thought she'd never see them again; she inhales deeply before breaking away.

"Okay, how did you get, like, ten times more pregnant in a month?" Caroline asks, and Elena laughs. "Seriously, let me see you!" She gives Elena a light push backwards, and then puts her hands on Elena's stomach. "Wait, oh my god, I can feel it," Caroline says.

"Yeah, she's kind of worked up right now," Elena says, with a grin. "It's her first party. I don't think she's used to the noise."

"She?" asks Caroline. "Wait, do you know it's a girl, then?"

"Oh, yeah," Elena says.

"Elena, do you know who all these people are?" Bonnie asks, looking around. "I wanna hear all about – everything, I just, I don't recognize most of them."

"Um, yeah, I think they're Klaus's," Elena says.

"Wait, what do you mean?" Caroline asks. "Klaus is here?"

"Yeah," Elena says, voice slow. She gestures to herself. "Wasn't that clear?"

"Hang on, that's a stunning dress," says Caroline, and Elena's almost thrown off by the change of topic until Caroline continues speaking. "Klaus is buying you designer clothes? What's going on?"

Elena raises her eyebrows. "Sorry?"

"Are you, like, his girlfriend?" Caroline asks, her voice just louder than a whisper, intonation full of shock.

Elena laughs, more out of surprise than anything. "I'm his human incubator-slash-blood bag," she replies.

"But he's treating you all right, then?" Caroline asks.

"Yeah!" Elena replies, and she feels a massive wave of affection for Caroline, then. It hadn't even occurred to her that her friends were worried about that. "Yeah, oh my god, I'm fine. I have clothes, I have books, I have good food. I'm okay, Care."

"Okay," says Caroline, voice wavering. "Good." She looks over her shoulder. "I need to find Tyler," she announces.

"He went outside a few minutes ago," Elena tells her, and so the three of them head out to the Lockwood backyard.

Klaus is on a stage, of course, making a speech. Elena rolls her eyes – of course he's gloating in the showiest way possible. She remembers him saying something about her friends having something planned, and she shoots a nervous look in their direction; she hopes to god they aren't going to pull some terrible scheme to try and kill Klaus. It seems like the kind of thing they'd do – it especially seems like the kind of thing Damon would do – but they'd fail, and she can't keep them safe if they make an attempt on Klaus's life.

And if they tried to kill him, they'd be doing it in her name, and she doesn't want him dead. It's been a long time since she has, if she's being honest with herself.

She's been at the party maybe an hour and a half when one of Klaus's hybrids – Mindy, she thinks her name is – corners her on the way out of the bathroom.

"Come with me," Mindy says. "Klaus wants to see you."

Elena raises an eyebrow. "If Klaus wanted to see me, he'd already be talking to me," she responds. "What do you want?"

She figures this is a hybrid who wants a favor, or wants to be unsired, or has some other reason to want Elena alone. She knows Klaus's hybrids; they're loyal to him beyond reason, to a point that makes Elena nauseous, if she thinks about it too hard. She never considers that she could be in danger.

Without a moment's notice, Mindy has a hand clamped over her mouth, and is spiriting Elena outside, beyond the safety of the Lockwood mansion. Elena cannot move, and doesn't even try to struggle, because she knows it's useless and there's no point in useless displays of willfulness when there's a fetus inside of her that could be at risk if she tries to pull one.

She can see where she is, though; she's near the stairs to Tyler's house, and there's a man in a suit standing on them, talking. She can't quite make out every word he says – she's too busy making sure she takes long, steady breaths, that the baby isn't cut off from oxygen – but she hears the voice that replies to his words, and it's _Klaus_ , and she knows Klaus well enough to understand what's going on from his tone.

This is Klaus's father. This is Mikael. It has to be.

She doesn't know much about Klaus's father, but she knows that if he's alive when Klaus had been told he was dead, that means there was a conspiracy, that means her friends were in on it, that means this is war.

That means she's leverage.

Mindy yanks her, suddenly, pulling her up the stairs and thrusting her into Mikael's grip. Elena meets Klaus's eyes, and they say everything he's never said about Mikael; that Mikael has a power over him that only a parent who's done wrong by you can possess.

It's the last thought she should be having, considering the circumstances, but she thinks she understands why Klaus killed Isobel for her, now. She remembers the way Isobel looked at her through the flames, the curl of her lips when she called Elena pathetic.

She can't see Mikael's face, but she can imagine the look in his eyes, and she can see herself in the way Klaus is looking back at him.

For a moment, she almost loves him for it.

Mikael's hand is digging into her back, and she can feel the tip of a knife right where her dress dips to expose her skin. She doesn't dare to move an inch, doesn't dare to breathe. She can feel his spittle against her throat when he talks.

"Come out and face me, boy," Mikael says.

Elena swallows.

Mikael laughs. "All these years you've whined and groveled about wanting a family, and here you're hesitating over saving the mother of your child? You're a coward, Niklaus."

"I'm not hesitating," Klaus says, the set of his jaw so stiff it trembles. "I'm deliberating."

"And what are you deliberating, boy?" Mikael asks. "Do share."

"I'm deliberating the likelihood that you'll stab my doppelganger the moment I step out of this house, just to spite me," Klaus says.

Mikael laughs again. There's a cruelty to it, something old; she can hear how ancient he is when he laughs, how many years he's spent uncaring, unfeeling, turning him into something that cannot be recognized as having ever been human. "Ah, Niklaus," Mikael says. "Your paranoia has only grown over the centuries."

Elena sees, then, sees with a clarity she shouldn't possess in a moment like this, sees what's happening like the world is a cadaver and her mind is a scalpel she can tear it open and probe it with. Of course Mikael will kill her the second Klaus gives in; Klaus is another man's son, and everything she's ever heard about him has lead her to understand that the root of Mikael's vendetta against Klaus is his fury at having been cuckolded. Mikael would want to kill her no matter what, because she's carrying Klaus's offspring, pregnant with a child that will ensure the continuation of Mikael's greatest shame.

What she also sees, though, on top of that, is that her friends planned this out with Mikael, and believed him when he said he wouldn't harm Elena. She doesn't know which friends were in on it – Damon, for sure, but Bonnie or Caroline or Stefan are anyone's guess – but she knows without a shred of doubt that they put their faith in the monster that monsters are scared of, and she's so angry she sees spots from forgetting to breathe.

"He's right," Elena says, instead, trying to keep her voice sure, hoping that Damon can get his head out of his ass enough to understand that she knows what she's talking about. She twists her head towards Mikael and meets his eyes; his face is right out of an old painting. "Klaus is right. You'll kill me no matter what, because you're such a _child_ that you've been holding onto the fact that your wife cheated on you for a thousand years."

She shakes her head at him, looks at him with the eyes of the girl whose blood created him. She can feel Tatia, in this moment, pumping through her veins, staring out through her face.

"You murdered all your children," she says, her lip curling a little, "but you're the only one who's really dead."

Mikael snarls at her. He'll kill her any second – anyone has to be able to see that, even Damon. Anyone has to be able to tell that whatever this plan is, it has to be called off now.

Things happen very quickly, then.

Damon burst out from _somewhere_ inside the house, moving faster than her eye can follow, and jams a stake into Klaus's heart. Klaus roars, and Elena feels numb, because this _can't_ be happening – and then Stefan's there, Stefan who she hasn't seen yet tonight, yanking Damon off of Klaus, and then she's being tossed to the ground as Klaus throws himself at Mikael, pins him down, and plunges the stake right into Mikael's heart.

She pulls herself up to a sitting position, and watches as Mikael burns.

Klaus is at her side in an instant. He doesn't look at her; his gaze is fixed on his father's scorched remains. "Are you alright?" he asks.

Elena nods, and he offers her a hand, still not looking at her; she gets to her feet. "I'm fine," she says.

"I'm taking you to a doctor," he tells her, in that same raw, one-note voice. "I'm not banking the child's safety on your absurd pain tolerance."

In the background, Damon is yelling at Stefan. Klaus's head turns towards them; Elena places a hand on his chest.

"Give me a minute with them," she asks.

Klaus meets her eyes. He looks hollowed out, like a fortress that's been stormed. "You can't really expect me to leave you with them," he says, the corner of his mouth turning up.

Elena purses her lips. "Go handle your hybrids," she says. "I have a few words for Damon." She looks up at Damon, still standing inside the house, and knows he heard; he's frozen, his gaze fixed on her. "I'll be safe," she says, not breaking eye contact with Damon. "He knows he's done enough damage tonight."

She doesn't know if she believed it would work, but it does. Klaus vanishes, and she advances on Damon.

Damon's eyes, at least, are not fixed on her stomach; they're locked with hers, and he looks amazed and afraid all at once. "Elena," he says, as she reaches the doorway of the house.

"What the hell were you thinking?" she asks. She doesn't raise her voice; she thinks she may be too angry to yell.

"What was I–" Damon breaks off and looks around, as though offended by the very question. "I did this for you!" he says. "To help you, to, to free you–"

"Mmm," Elena says, and takes another step towards him. "You used me as leverage to help me? Help I never asked you for?"

Damon looks guilty, then. "Mikael went off-script," he says. "He was – you were never supposed to be in danger, Elena, you have to believe me."

"I do," she says, and it's true – she believes, without a shred of uncertainty, that Damon had never intended for Elena's life to be at risk. "But I'm not just me, remember?"

Damon's eyes flicker down to her stomach, at long last. "You mean the–"

"Yes, I mean the goddamn baby!" Apparently there's no such thing as being too angry to yell, because all of a sudden she's screaming. "So you made a bad deal, so you trusted someone you shouldn't have trusted, I get that, Damon. That's what you do. You make dumb bargains because you think you can pull them off without a scratch."

She doesn't want to go inside Tyler's house, not with what she's about to scream, so she takes a step backwards, down one stair. "I'm pregnant, Damon!" She tries to keep her breathing under control. "And I just had a knife to my back! I could have had a miscarriage. I could _still_ have a miscarriage, because it's not like my blood pressure's lowered any!"

She takes a deep breath, because she's right, she's still putting the fetus at risk just by being this worked up. "I get taking risks, Damon," she says. "And I get risking me, because, frankly, with my track record, I'll probably make it through. But I don't want Klaus dead, not for a second, and I don't want this child harmed, either, and you almost made both of those things happen tonight in my name."

She stares at him, trying to control her breaths, her heart rate, trying to become less angry even though she can't imagine that happening right now, and then, after a few minutes, shakes her head.

"You're trying to get revenge, Damon, but I don't need to be avenged," she says, and now she steps towards him, placing a hand on her stomach. "I'm right here. I'm alive. I'm okay. I'm going to be a mom. And… and if you care about me like you say you do, then just let me have that much." She swallows, closes her eyes for a moment, and then looks up at him again. "Please, just let me have that much."

Klaus comes by a few minutes later, and takes Elena with him without so much as a look in Damon's direction. They see a doctor, who tells them that the baby is just fine, and then they head back to the house. It feels too big and quiet for Elena's liking, and yet she's relieved to be here, nonetheless. She doesn't know how she feels about tonight, and she doesn't know how Klaus feels about tonight, but she knows she's relieved to lie down next to him in that big bed, to curl in against his chest, to measure her breaths against his until she falls asleep.

This isn't what she asked for out of life, and this isn't what she wanted, but after everything, right now, she thinks it's good enough.


	16. blood will have blood

**PART IV**

 _There's blood between us, love, my love,_

 _There's father's blood, there's brother's blood;_

 _And blood's a bar I cannot pass_

– Christina Rossetti

They should have left the next day, or the day after that, taken off for California and stayed gone, but Stefan, it seems, has lost part of himself in his months of compulsion, sunken into his anger, and so the next morning Elena wakes up to the sound of things breaking.

"Klaus?" she asks, pulling a robe over her nightgown and walking out of her bedroom into the hallway.

The grand staircase, which had been nearing completion last night, is now a mess of broken tables and chairs, strewn all around like the site of a tornado. "Oh my god," she says, and comes to a stop next to the balcony. "What–"

She stops talking when Klaus appears on the lower level, holding onto a wooden cabinet, and then throws said cabinet across the room. She jumps a little when she hears it break against the marble floor.

"Klaus, what are you doing?" she asks, and he looks up at her like he hadn't noticed her until then. If Klaus is that unaware of his surroundings, he has to be in a bad mood. Elena wraps her arms around her stomach on instinct, even though she doesn't think Klaus would harm her or the child out of misdirected anger; he's got a bad temper, but he's had a thousand years to practice managing it, and if she's honest, she thinks he has a lot more control than he wants to let on.

"It seems your boyfriend decided to lay his hands on my property," Klaus tells her.

It takes her a second. "My boyfriend–" she cuts herself off. "Wait, Stefan? He hasn't been my boyfriend in forever, I'm–" practically your wife at this point, she wants to say, but she stops herself. "What did he do?"

"He took–" Klaus takes a break from talking to kick in a wall. Elena winces. "He took my family."

"Your – the coffins?" Elena says. "He took them?"

In response, Klaus kicks another part of the wall. "And that dunce of a quarterback you call a friend daggered Rebekah, as though he has the right–"

"Aren't the coffins in California?" she asks. She would come down the stairs, around now, but she wants to keep her distance while he's in this mood.

"I'd transported them here," Klaus replies, after a minute. "I'd expected to stay longer–"

"You didn't tell me that," Elena says.

Klaus growls. "I don't tell you lots of things," he replies.

"Well, I'm not a doll you can just put back on the shelf when the mood strikes you," she tells him, and takes a step down the stairs. "My family lives here. My friends live here. I should have–"

"You're unhappy about this," Klaus says, cutting her off, and she blinks. When she opens her eyes again, he's materialized right in front of her.

"I wish you'd told me," she replies, but he shakes his head.

"No, not about that," he says. "You're unhappy that we're staying here. Don't deny it, I can see it on your face."

Elena swallows and looks down. It's a long moment before she speaks. "I like our life in California," she says. "Every bad thing that's ever happened to me happened in this town. It's suffocating."

"Our life in California," Klaus says. He sounds like he's savoring the words. "That sounds awfully domestic, love."

"We live in a beach house and I'm pregnant," she tells him, with a small smile. "The other day we went shopping and I had a meltdown over baby clothes. It sort of is."

There's a dark expression on Klaus's face, like this has never occurred to him before.

"Except for the part where you're an ancient monster who feeds on human blood," she adds, going for humor. "That's not in any Hallmark cards."

Klaus laughs at that, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

. . .

Elena leaves the house not long after, even though she's dreading it, not just because of what happened last night but because the responsibility she feels just by acknowledging that she's home is suffocating. She knows that as soon as she's found out all the ways home has fallen apart, it'll be her job to fix it, and it makes her so angry she wants to cry and throw up. She's fought the battle and she's lived through the war, but if there's anything she'd learned in all her years of loving literature, it's that you can't go home again.

She takes the car and drives to her house. The roads of Mystic Falls feel like prison bars; she grips the steering wheel and, for one, wonderful moment, imagines hitting the gas and never letting up, just driving away and pretending she doesn't have any obligations to anyone but herself.

She parks the car outside her house, and walks up the front steps. The door isn't locked; she'd always made a point to lock it, when she'd lived here, but any potential threats either can't come in the house or can't be stopped by a lock, so she figures it shouldn't matter. It upsets her anyways.

"Hello?" she calls, pushing open the door.

There's no reply; she doesn't hear any creaking floorboards, so she figures no one's home. Just as well.

She walks down the hallway to the kitchen; she doesn't want to go upstairs to her bedroom, not for a second. It's a teenage girl's bedroom; Elena feels like a ghost, haunting the hallways she grew up in. It's her childhood room; she thinks about the nursery she should be home in California designing, and the thought of it aches. She doesn't want to be here, another dead girl in this town of the damned, breathing in the damp, heavy air that tastes like grief and chalk in her lungs; she wants bright sun and open water and the promise of new life.

There's a pot of coffee, though it isn't on anymore. Elena hasn't had any coffee yet today; she microwaves some in her mom's old mug, then sits at the table and sips at it. She fishes her phone out of her pocket and calls Klaus.

"Any luck?" she asks, when he picks up.

Klaus sighs. "Alas, your boyfriend remains elusive."

"Stop calling him my boyfriend," she tells him. "He isn't, and I don't want him to be."

Klaus is quiet for a moment. "Duly noted," he replies.

"When can we go home?" she asks.

She can hear Klaus's grin in his voice. "Not enjoying your journey down memory lane?" he asks.

"I died in this town," she says. "I don't want to live here."

"Where are you?" he asks.

She sighs. "My house," she says. "No one's home, though."

"Did you take the car?" he asks. She thinks he sounds like he's frowning.

"Yeah, you weren't using it," she replies.

He laughs. "Fair enough, sweetheart. Don't let your uncle-father drag you into any halfwit plots against me when you see him."

"I'll do my best," she replies, voice dry. She hears a sound at the door. "I think someone's home. Talk to you later." She hangs up.

She could get up and go to the door, but she doesn't want to – she's pregnant, she doesn't have to move if she doesn't want to. The front door opens, and she hears John saying "showing up in the bar like he owns the place–"

They're probably talking about Klaus.

"Hey," she calls, and their talking stops immediately. She sees Jeremy first, and despite her bad mood she can't help but grin at him. He rushes down the hallway towards her, and she pushes out her chair, standing to hug him.

He's cut his hair; she leans back and runs a hand through it, laughing. "You really have left your stoner days behind, haven't you?" she asks.

He doesn't respond; he's staring at her bump – which doesn't even look that big, under her t-shirt. She frowns. "Hey," she says, and he looks back up at her with a sheepish smile.

"Bonnie said you were back," he tells her.

"Yeah, I didn't see you at Tyler's last night," she says with a laugh. "Too cool to go to homecoming?"

"You were at the homecoming dance?" John asks.

Elena looks over at him and sighs. "Please tell me you weren't part of that plan," she says.

John's silence is confirmation in and of itself.

Elena presses her eyes shut, and takes a deep breath. "I'm going to say this once," she says, keeping her voice steady. "Don't try to kill him again. I don't want him to die. If you think you're doing me a favor, or saving me, or whatever, you're wrong. I'm fine, I don't need to be saved, and I'd appreciate it if you'd respect that." She looks at Jeremy. "That goes for you, too," she says.

"Elena," says John, "you can't honestly expect–"

"I'm not going to repeat myself, John," she says. "You don't have to like it, but please respect it."

"Are you hungry?" Jeremy asks. It's a terrible segue, but it's so charming and so Jeremy that Elena can't help but smile.

"Sure," she says. "Pizza or Chinese?"

. . .

Much to Elena's disappointment, they don't leave the next day, or the day after that, or even the day after that. Klaus is intent on getting his coffins back, and for some reason Elena can't discern, Klaus seems to want to be in Mystic Falls, at least for the time being.

"Can't we just go home?" she asks, sitting on the couch in the living room, on the fifth day they've been back in town. Klaus has his contractors at work on the house again, and the noise is driving Elena insane. "Let your lackeys take care of this whole coffin business and just… catch the next plane out of Richmond?"

"I thought you'd be glad of this time with your family, sweetheart," Klaus says.

"I thought you'd be glad to be rid of yours, since all you do is cart them around like dead weight you can't get rid of," she returns.

Klaus looks back at her. "I was only keeping them like that until the Mikael situation was dealt with," he tells her.

"So what, you're… planning to wake them up?" she asks.

Klaus turns back to the fireplace. "Eventually," he says.

"Okay, well, when's eventually?" she asks. "Are you going to tell me before you decide to wake up my daughter's assortment of serial killer aunts and uncles? I'd like some warning before a bunch of bloodthirsty strangers invade my life again."

"Elijah's not a stranger," Klaus says in response.

"Oh, yeah, Elijah. That makes me feel way better," she says. He laughs a bit at that. "Look, I don't exactly appreciate it when you uproot my life without consulting me, but if you've got your mind made up about something that's going to affect me, at least tell me about it first."

"Very well," he says. "I think I'd like to make a home of this town."

"Nope," Elena replies. "Not happening."

He looks at her again, raising an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"I don't want to be here, I don't want my child to be here," she says. "I want California and her nursery–"

"–you can design a nursery here," he tells her.

"I want her nursery in California overlooking the ocean," Elena continues. "Three of her grandparents and her mother died in this town. I don't want her to live here."

Klaus is silent for a moment. "Five," he says, at last.

Elena tilts her head. "Five what?" she asks,

"Five of her grandparents," he tells her.

Mikael died here, of course, she saw it, but… "Your mother died here?" Elena asks. "Wait, what?"

Klaus closes his eyes. "I grew up in this town," he says, at long last. "In a Viking settlement, a thousand years ago. This is where my family was turned."

Elena feels like she's been hollowed out. It's too… "And you want to live here?" she asks. "After all that, you want to spend time here?"

"I'd forgotten how peaceful it could be here," he tells her.

She stares at him, slack-jawed. "Peaceful?" She laughs; she can't help it. "That stillness in the air isn't peace, Klaus, it's death. You –" She laughs again. "You were cursed here! The original doppelganger died here! Katherine's still in a tomb here!"

"Poetic, isn't it?" he says.

She shakes her head with an incredulous laugh. "Fuck poetry!" she says. "Let's just get out of this town, and we can make our own poetry. Death and the maiden, and their impossible child, you're the hybrid and I'm the doppelganger, we don't need to surround ourselves with history, it follows us wherever we go." She gets up off the couch and walks to him. "Don't do this to yourself, to me, to us. Let's leave before it's too late."

His gaze is searing, but she doesn't look away.

"I have to get my coffins back," he says, at last.

"Then after," she says. "We stay until you get your coffins back, and then we get out of here. Promise me."

The look he gives her seems to last an eternity.

"I promise," he tells her.

. . .

The days drag on, and Klaus doesn't seem to make any progress with Stefan, and the longer she's in town the more frustrated everyone seems to get with Elena's lack of interest in, well, being a teenager.

"Elena," Caroline says to her, over a lunch she all but forced her to come to. "Honey, I love you, but you've got to stop moping around. Okay? You were less depressed when you'd just died."

"I'm not depressed," Elena protests, dipping a fry in Caroline's ketchup.

"Well, whatever you are, it's just making you miserable," Caroline says. "Come on. Let's go out tonight."

"I can't drink, remember?" Elena says.

Caroline rolls her eyes. "We don't have to go party, Elena. We can have a movie night, or go out to a movie–"

"I can't tonight," Elena says. "I already have plans."

Caroline wrinkles her nose. "With Klaus? What, like, date night?"

Elena shrugs, and pops another fry in her mouth.

"Okay, then not tonight," Caroline says. "Another night, then."

Elena sighs.

"Elena!" Caroline slams her hands down on the table. "If you don't make a plan with me, I'm going to show up and kidnap you, and then Klaus will kill me and that'll show you."

Elena laughs despite herself. "Okay, okay," she says. "I'll make a plan. What are we doing for your birthday?"

"We're not," says Caroline abruptly.

Elena raises an eyebrow. "Not?" she asks.

"I just… don't want to celebrate this year, okay?" Caroline says. "Another night. How about tomorrow?"

"No, no, hold up," Elena says. "You love your birthday. You claimed your birthday as everyone's favorite day of the year."

"Well, it isn't anymore," Caroline says. "Your calendar's freed up to make your kid's birth your favorite day now. You're welcome."

"My kid's not even going to be born this year," Elena says, and leans across the table. "Care, what's wrong?"

"I'm just… not really feeling my birthday this year, okay?" she says.

"Why not?" Elena asks. "You've been waiting to turn eighteen since forever."

"Yeah, but I'm not turning eighteen, okay?" Caroline says. "I'm never turning eighteen. So I don't really feel like celebrating the fact that I'm never going to not be seventeen ever again."

Elena swallows. "Care–"

"Look, it's fine, okay?" Caroline says. "I'm fine. I just don't want to celebrate this year."

Elena frowns, and then opens her hand across the table.

"Elena–"

"Caroline," says Elena, in a soft voice, and Caroline sighs and places her hand in Elena's.

"Okay, no birthday party," Elena says, voice still gentle. "But we're still going to do something."

"I don't need to celebrate–"

"We won't celebrate," Elena says. "Okay? We'll mourn." Caroline bites her lip. "You don't need a party, you need a funeral. The graveyard, sunset. I'll bake a cake."

Caroline laughs weakly at that. "Oh, god, please don't," she says. "Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I need your cooking to kill me again."

"Hey," Elena says, in a failed attempt at mock outrage. She laughs, too.

. . .

Just like that, just when things are finally okay again and Elena's finally letting herself laugh, the world crumbles to pieces.

Klaus goes to a town function while Elena holds a funeral for Caroline, and then out of nowhere Stefan has her in his car, Klaus on speaker, and is threatening to drive her off of Wickery Bridge, pregnancy be damned, unless Klaus gets rid of his hybrids, and once Stefan stops the car, far too late, Elena stumbles out and pukes over the side of the bridge, into the water.

She refuses to get back in the car with him, and Stefan drives off without even putting in any effort, and she doesn't understand this creature the blood turns him into, doesn't understand how he could love her and love her and then leave her here, doesn't understand anything but the relief that fills her lungs when she sees Klaus's car speeding towards her to pick her up.

She's been crying since Stefan hit the brakes, but now she's crying in relief. Klaus jumps out of the car and races over to her in the blink of an eye.

"Are you hurt?" he asks.

"No," she says, and chokes down a sob. "No, I'm – I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you're crying," Klaus points out.

Elena laughs at that, and then swallows. "I went off this bridge in a car when I was sixteen," she says. "My parents died. I would've died, if Stefan hadn't pulled me out. I don't – I can't –" She hiccups a little, and wraps her arms around her stomach.

Klaus looks at her for a moment, and then wraps an arm around her back and pulls her to him. She closes her eyes and takes long, deep breaths.

"I'll kill him," Klaus tells her.

She nuzzles her face into his neck, and his chin rests against the top of her head. "No, don't," Elena says. After a moment, she continues with: "But you can hit him really hard next time you see him for me."

Klaus laughs at that. "Let's get you home, love," he says. "One of my hybrids picked up that tea you like."

Elena puts on a classic rock station while Klaus drives them to the house, and she takes a hot shower, then curls up under a blanket with a hot cup of tea.

"I want to go home," Elena tells Klaus. "You need to get those coffins as soon as you can, because I want to get out of Mystic Falls as soon as humanly – vampirically –" she sighs. "As soon as possible."

Klaus nods. "Soon, sweetheart," he tells her.

She finishes her tea and drifts off on the sofa.

. . .

Klaus doesn't want to let her out of the house for the next few days, and while usually she'd fight him about it just on principle, this time, she can't help but agree with him: she doesn't want to risk running into Stefan, either. She feels sick at the thought.

Klaus gets rid of most of his hybrids – Elena hates what they represent and hates what's being done to them, but she finds that she doesn't in fact want them to go. "Just because you said you'd send them away doesn't mean you have to follow through," she says from the couch, while Klaus has the lot of them lined up like soldiers for him to evaluate their immediate usefulness.

Klaus laughs at her. "Well, that's rather unexpected," he says, "you telling me I'm too moral." He sounds amused, but there's something reserved to his tone – there's been something off ever since that night. Elena thinks it's that he's been reminded of how fragile she is (and she kicks herself a little for thinking of herself the way he would, like an object, a prized bauble – she's fragile, she's delicate, she's breakable. She never used to think of herself in those terms. She doesn't like it.) Part of her thinks that's kind of ironic, him having killed her and all, but it sort of makes sense, for Klaus – Elena's death belonged to him, was his right and prerogative, at least in his twisted paradigm. It would be just like him for the fact that someone else could kill Elena to have never occurred to him, or to have only occurred to him in an abstract sense, like the knowledge that the world was always spinning beneath them. For all she knows, the idea that Stefan dared to threaten her is a wound to his pride. He's lain low, lately, and it scares her – she told Klaus not to kill Stefan, but it isn't at all like him to listen to her about things like this. She expected him to carry out some horrible revenge – he still hasn't punished Damon for plotting against him, come to think of it – she knows he hasn't changed his ways or turned a new leaf. If he's lying low, there's a reason.

A few days later, Klaus begs off to take care of some sort of business that Elena's pretty sure she'd rather not know about, but expects is some terrible revenge plot that will take him days. Instead, though, he comes back in possession of his coffins. She can hardly believe her eyes.

"You got them back," she says.

Klaus smiles at her. There are spots of blood on his collar. "I got them back."

"How?" she asks. "Is… did you…"

"None of your precious friends are dead, sweetheart," he tells her.

She's almost shivering. "We're leaving," she says. "You said we'd leave."

Klaus nods. "The day after tomorrow," he tells her.

She can't help it; she gets up off her seat and rushes across the room to him, as close to running as she can safely get, and throws her arms around his neck, pulling his mouth down to hers. "Oh, thank god," she said, when she pulls away.

Klaus plants a kiss on her cheek, feather-light, but long. "You should get ready for bed. Get some rest, sweetheart."

Elena raises her eyebrows. "I've been resting for days," she says.

Klaus grins at her. "Then you should just get ready for bed."

She laughs and steps back, their bodies unwinding like they were made so perfectly to fit together that they could never possibly be tangled. "Don't be too long," she says, and leaves the room.

She's headed back up the stairs when she hears the unmistakable sound of a body being thrown into a wall – and shit, she actually recognizes that sound, it shouldn't be something she's so familiar with. She can't imagine that anyone threw Klaus into a wall, so she figures he's fighting and probably killing a rogue hybrid. She winces when she hears something crash, and decides it's worth going back downstairs to talk Klaus of killing the poor guy.

Of course, it's just Elena's luck that it's not a stray hybrid glaring daggers at Klaus: it's Elijah.

"Elijah," she says, her voice hardly louder than a murmur.

Elijah blinks, and looks stunned. "Elena," he says. "You managed to survive."

"All thanks to you, brother," Klaus says with a grin. "And aren't we all glad of it?"

Elijah's eyes travel to Elena's stomach, and then his gaze snaps back to Klaus's face. "You had her inseminated," he says, voice accusatory.

"She speaks, you know," Elena says. "And she can answer questions and everything."

Elijah raises an eyebrow at her. "My apologies," he says. "I'm not accustomed to my brother allowing his prisoners full command of their faculties."

"Well, I'm not used to living in the middle ages, when women were considered property," she quips. It's not fair – knowing Klaus, Elijah would have been right ninety percent of the time – and Klaus does think of her as property, she can see it in his eyes sometimes – and Elijah is the reason she survived – but she doesn't owe him a thing, and certainly not her sympathy.

"Were you willingly inseminated, then?" Elijah asks.

"She willingly consented to the procedure, brother, but she was taken quite by surprise by the results," Klaus says, and Elena kind of wants to smack his arm.

Elijah is still for a moment. "Elaborate," he says at last.

Klaus grins. "Elena here is pregnant with my child," he says.

Elijah blinks. "That's impossible," he says, voice matter-of-fact.

"So is the doppelganger," says Klaus. He looks terribly delighted with himself.

. . .

Elijah's presence is as alien as always, but more alien still are his attempts to manipulate her into leaving the house and going out for dinner the next day, and Elena really hasn't spent much time with the Salvatores in a while if being manipulated in the name of her own good feels unusual to her.

"Look, what do you have planned that you want me gone for, Elijah?" Elena asks at last. Just then, Klaus walks in.

"You didn't tell her?" he asks Elijah, sounded amused and put out at the same time. He turns his attention towards her. "I've invited the Salvatore brothers over for a friendly dinner," he says. "Getting to know the new neighbors, and all."

"You didn't," Elena says.

Klaus grins. "'Course I did, sweetheart."

Elena takes a deep breath. "Then you'll have to have the table set for five," she says, "because I'm staying."

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Well, then, sweetheart," he says. "I can't say I'm not looking forward to seeing this.

Dinner is awful. There's no getting around it. Elena sees Stefan's face and she has to concentrate to keep herself from hyperventilating and to keep her heart from racing because every time she looks at him she sees his face in the driver's seat, threatening to drive – drive her over –

"I'm going to excuse myself," she says before the first course has been served, and stalks up to her bedroom, turns on the shower and climbs in, and then cries, as quiet as she can, hoping desperately that the sound of the shower drowns out her gasps. She can't – she loved Stefan and he was set to do that, the worst thing he could have done to her, he knew, he knew her parents had died going off that bridge, she just – she can't breathe, thinking about him, about them, about all that they'd had and whether he thinks she deserves this for giving that up for Klaus – but she hadn't, she'd given it up to give herself over to die, to save them, to save him and everyone else, she – she takes a deep, shaking breath and forces herself to stop fucking crying, turns off the shower and climbs out, brushes through her hair and towels off, and pulls on a nightgown and a robe.

She'd thought she could do this dinner, could face down Stefan, but she couldn't handle it. She isn't strong enough. She hates herself for it.

She comes downstairs over an hour later, when she's been startled out of her attempt at sleeping by what she knows is Klaus screaming, roaring, and she thinks she might honest-to-god lose the baby from the panic that grips her lungs and stomach and head at the certainty that Stefan and Damon have managed to kill Klaus, they've figured it out and done it–

She runs downstairs and locks eyes with Klaus. He's alive.

He's being held back by a man she doesn't recognize, and he's being stabbed by a blonde in a red dress, but – it takes Elena a moment, but then she catches sight of the blonde's profile and recognizes her. It's the sister she met in the gym.

"Looks like someone caught himself a doppelganger after all," says the man holding Klaus back. He grins at her, and she shivers. "She looks delicious."

"Kol, I swear –" Klaus says, but Elijah's quicker. He puts a hand out, and the man – Kol – sighs at the gesture.

"Very well," he says, and looks at her again. "Hello."

"What's going on?" Elena asks.

Kol scoffs. "Now, I may be a bit behind the times, but surely it's only proper to begin an acquaintanceship with introductions?" he asks. "For example: I'm Kol. I'm this one's brother, and – a century ago, apparently – he did me the dubious honor of sticking a dagger into my heart and locking me in a box. Your turn."

"My name's Elena," Elena replies, anger coiling in the pit of her stomach. "I'm the doppelganger. I'm miraculously pregnant with your brother's child, so if you wouldn't mind letting go of him, I'd really appreciate it."

Kol steps back, with a small laugh that's both amazed and scornful at once. "A miracle baby? Goodness, times really have changed if vampires can conceive now, haven't they?"

"Vampires still can't," Elena says. "Hybrids, it would seem, can." Her eyes scan the room, and land on another man she doesn't recognize, dressed in clothes that seem way more old-fashioned than Kol's. She raises her eyebrows.

"Finn Mikaelson," the man says.

Elena laughs at the inclusion of the last name. "Oh, you advertise that fact, now?"

Finn narrows his eyes, but Elena doesn't elaborate.

"I like what you've done with the place, Nik," his sister – Rebekah, she remembers now – says, and then throws a vase into a painting. Elena winces at the sound, and goes to the kitchen to make herself some tea. She figures this will be a long night.

She manages to tune out the shouting and angry voices, but she notices the moment everything goes silent – and this is Klaus's family, she doubts silence is a regular feature in their gatherings. She makes her way back into the room, and sees a woman she knows she's never seen before, but who's very face makes Elena go cold all over, and whose voice makes Elena tremble so violently she's afraid she'll spill her tea.

"Hello, there," the woman says, in a strange, lilting voice. "You must be Elena." She offers a smile that makes Elena want to drop her mug and go running.

"I'm Esther."


	17. i shall love thee but better after death

"Your mother wants to throw a ball?" she asks Klaus, the next morning, within the relative privacy of their own room. There isn't much privacy to be had, now that she somehow lives in a house full of original vampires, but it's better than having this conversation in the living room.

"And why not have a ball?" Klaus asks, in way of response. He sorts through her dresses while she sits on the bed. "It's been centuries since we've all been together, and it is a tradition, when our family reunites."

"Sure," says Elena, and Klaus laughs. "I still can't believe you're throwing a ball. I mean, it's not like we're planning to build a life in Mystic Falls. We're leaving soon."

"Things have changed, Elena," says Klaus.

"No, they haven't," Elena tells him, and tries to control the nerves building in her veins. Things can't change. "I don't care that your family's back. I don't want to die in this town."

Klaus looks over his shoulder at her. "You aren't going to die again, Elena," he tells her.

Elena blinks. "Yeah, I am," she says, after a long moment. "This town is going to kill me, Klaus. I can feel it in my bones."

"I hardly think you have the gift of prophecy," Klaus tells her.

Elena grits her teeth. "I know what I know, okay?" she says. "This town isn't good for me. Blame it on bad memories, or stress, or whatever, but it's bad for me and it's bad for the baby, and I don't want to stay here. You know this."

Klaus sighs. "Yes," he says, "very well. We'll return to California in the near future."

"California?" There's a female voice at the door – it's Klaus's sister, Elena realizes. "It's been centuries since I've been to California. Am I invited?"

Rebekah walks into the room, hair in a sleek ponytail. Elena looks at her. It's strange, even now, to think of Klaus as having a sister; this girl could have been in high school with Elena, from the looks of things, but instead she's an ancient instrument of death.

And she's Elena's child's aunt. Elena swallows.

"If you're on your best behavior," Klaus replies, "then yes, you might be welcome."

"Well, then," Rebekah says, and comes to sit on the bed next to Elena, "I suppose I'd better make nice with your new mistress, in that case."

"Excuse me?" Elena says, raising an eyebrow at her.

Rebekah fixes her with an inquisitive look. "Girlfriend, then. I don't particularly care. Elena, isn't it?"

"Yes," says Elena. She knows Rebekah knows her name, is only asking to prove a point, but it still bothers her.

"Well. Elena." Rebekah enunciates her name like it's an inside joke. "I haven't a single dress formal enough for tonight, and, having spent a month in a coffin, I'm certainly not looking my best. Care to join me on a shopping trip?"

"You want to go shopping?" Elena asks, a little incredulous. Rebekah shrugs. Elena looks to Klaus, who's carefully avoiding her gaze, and then back to Rebekah.

"Sure," she says, at last. "I guess I could use a new dress for tonight."

"Brilliant," says Rebekah, and jumps to her feet. "Put on some clothing and be ready in ten minutes. I don't have any time to waste." She rushes out of the room.

Elena raises an eyebrow at Klaus. "What was that about?" she asks.

Klaus laughs, and then shrugs. "I think she was trying to make a good impression," he tells her by way of response.

Elena hears a crash from downstairs, followed by an "oh, fuck you, Nik!"

Klaus laughs. "My baby sister," he says, voice fond. She thinks he doesn't mean to sound so affectionate; she thinks it means he really does love her, despite his complaints. He grins at Elena. "Play nice with her, won't you, sweetheart?"

Elena thinks Rebekah must still be listening. "I'll be nice if I like her, I won't be if I don't," she tells him. "She can't be as much of a jackass as you, anyway, can she?"

Klaus grins. "You might be surprised," he tells her,

Elena rolls her eyes, but can't stop a grin from spreading across her face. "Maybe," she tells him, letting the doubt seep into her voice. "But, you know, I really don't think I will be."

She makes for the wardrobe, and starts figuring out what to wear.

. . .

"So I've heard the story of how you survived, of course, but what the bloody hell compelled you to get under my brother right after he murdered you?"

Elena's been alone with Rebekah for about an hour, but she's quickly coming to the conclusion that Rebekah doesn't despise Elena as much as she seems to; she really is this rude and abrupt. It's an affront to Elena's Southern sensibilities (which says a lot, really, if she's more disturbed by rudeness than murder and compulsion), but she's trying not to let it shock her.

For the most part, she's failing.

Rebekah notices that the nail technician has stopped scrubbing the dead skin off her feet – or lack thereof, since Elena isn't sure but can't imagine you get dead skin when you're already dead, or maybe you do, vampires still eat and everything, god, it's not worth the mental gymnastics, really. "We're running lines," she snaps at the woman. "For a play. God, don't be so judgey."

The woman looks fed up with Rebekah, and Elena can't blame her, but she returns to talking to her coworker in a low voice.

"Why didn't you just compel her?" Elena asks, voice quiet.

Rebekah rolls her eyes. "You've clearly spent too much time with my brothers," she tells Elena. "Why ruin a perfectly bad impression by compelling everyone not to be offended?"

So the rudeness is deliberate. Good to know.

Rebekah sighs. "I hope you haven't forgotten my question. I certainly haven't."

Elena purses her lips. Because I still felt like I was dead and it made me feel like I was alive, she thinks. Because it had been itching under my skin for weeks and weeks. Because I'd saved everyone and I had the right to be selfish, just for one moment. "Because I wanted to," she says.

Rebekah shrugs. "Can't argue with that, I suppose," she says. "Though I will say your taste is rather questionable."

Elena laughs wryly at that. "Yeah, a psychologist would have a field day with me," she says.

Rebekah's mouth quirks up at the corner; it's the first smile she's offered Elena that isn't a smirk. "You and me both, darling," she says.

For a moment, she seems almost vulnerable. Then she tosses her hair and grins again. "Pale pink for your mani and your pedi?" she says. "Katerina was always much bolder with color."

"Well, I'm not Katherine," Elena says, trying not to think of where Katherine is right now.

"Of course not, you're actually tolerable," Rebekah returns. "What color dress are you thinking of for tonight?"

"White?" Elena says. It's been so long since she's done this, girl talk, but she's still got to have it in her; and besides, she's been friends with Caroline Forbes since kindergarten. "Not like, bridal white, but… maybe a really pale pink, or cream, or something."

Rebekah scoffs. "That's awfully virginal, considering," she says.

"Oh, thanks," says Elena; she shouldn't be put out, it's just a snide comment, but she is. "I'd forgotten, you know."

Rebekah is quiet for a long moment. "What's it like?" she asks, finally.

Elena narrows her eyes. "What, being pregnant?"

Rebekah nods.

Elena frowns. "I don't know," she says, and looks down at her stomach. "Different, I guess."

"Is it as miserable as people say?" Rebekah asks.

"No," says Elena, and she takes a moment to think about what she wants to say. "I mean, it's not fun, it's exhausting and I'm sore a lot, but… I mean, six months ago I didn't think I'd even live to have kids, so, while this isn't how I ever imagined having a child, I'm not… I'm not going to take it for granted, you know?"

Rebekah nods, but doesn't offer any sort of response on the topic. After a few minutes, she says "all this sitting around is making me hungry, where should we eat after this?" and doesn't bring up the question again.

She's a little less snide, Elena thinks; or she could just be imagining things. She's never met anyone quite like Rebekah.

. . .

When she's all dressed for the ball, Elena looks in the mirror, at her curled hair and perfect makeup and floor-length gown, and thinks, I'm never going to get to go to prom.

It's a stupid thought. She tries to make it leave her head.

"Are you ready, my dear?" Klaus asks, from the door. Elena turns to look at him.

"Yeah, I am," she says. "When are people meant to arrive?"

Klaus grins. "They already have," he says.

Elena closes her eyes, takes a moment to brace herself, and then opens her eyes and takes Klaus's outstretched arm. "Well, then I guess we're fashionably late."

It feels like something from a Disney movie, walking down the sweeping staircase with her white dress fluttering all around her, except that there is no prince and she's on the arm of the big bad wolf. For a moment, she thinks about the Miss Mystic Pageant, about knowing every eye was on her except those of the person who was supposed to meet her at the bottom step, but she doesn't want to think about Stefan, not in front of so many people.

Not long after they get to the main floor of the room, Klaus leans down to whisper in her ear. "Would you care to join me in greeting our esteemed mayor, sweetheart?"

Elena looks across the room and sees Carol Lockwood making her way through the throngs of people. "No, thanks," she says. Carol knows she's pregnant, she knows Carol knows, but she's not sure she's up to seeing the way Carol will look at her, the way she'll speak to her. "I'll hang back."

"Very well," Klaus says, and plants a kiss on her temple before taking off from her side.

He's barely been gone a minute before Finn swoops in, as though out of nowhere, with two glasses of champagne.

"You look lovely," he tells her, and extends her one.

Elena raises an eyebrow. "I'm pregnant, I can't drink," she replies.

Finn's expression doesn't change a bit. "Is that so? Fascinating." He puts the glass down on the table next to them. "I was hoping I'd have a chance to speak with you."

"Really?" Elena asks. She'd gotten the impression he had no interest in being within a mile of her.

Finn nods. "I'm terribly sorry for all that my siblings have forced you to endure, of course," he says. The words come out in the most disinterested tone Elena can imagine them being said in, but she doesn't think Finn means to sound insincere; she doesn't think he's even particularly aware of it.

"… okay," she says, once it's clear he's waiting for her to speak.

"My mother was hoping that she could have an audience with you tonight," he tells her. "She's very keen to speak with you."

Their mother. Esther. Elena hasn't seen more than a glimpse of Esther since meeting her the night before. "Somehow I haven't gotten that impression from her," she says.

Finn looks vaguely put out. "She wishes to speak with you in private," he tells her, as though having to spell this out for her is a heavy burden. "Away from prying ears."

"Why?" Elena asks. There are more tactful ways she could ask this question, but something tells her this will get on Finn's nerves the most, and while she's only just met the man, something about him leaves a bad taste in her mouth.

Finn purses his lips. "You'll have to speak with her – alone – to find out," he tells her. "Now, if you'll come with me, while Niklaus is otherwise en–"

"Elena!" Jenna grabs Elena's elbow and pulls her into a hug. "Oh my god, you look gorgeous!" She turns to Finn, and eyes him up and down in a way that Elena knows is totally for show, and makes her love Jenna even more. "Oh, and you are you?" she asks, voice overly flirtatious.

Finn squirms for a moment, then excuses himself, and Jenna rounds on Elena.

"He looked like he was bothering you," she says. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Elena says, and smiles. "Thanks. He – thanks, yeah."

It's nice to catch up with Jenna – she's seen Jenna since being back a number of times, but she's been so unhappy that it's been hard to actually enjoy Jenna's company as much as Jenna's company deserves to be enjoyed. Jenna is here with Alaric, who looks totally out of place in his tux, and it warms Elena's heart. She's so distracted watching them banter that she doesn't notice all the originals gathered on the staircase until she hears Elijah's voice ringing out across the room.

"This is so friggin' pretentious," Jenna murmurs to her as Elijah speaks. Elena stifles a laugh, but listens to Elijah's toast, and turns to look for Klaus when he mentions a dance.

She feels a breath tickle her ear and turns around to see him. "You know, it's not particularly polite to sneak up on people," she says, voice teasing.

Klaus laughs. "Well, love, I have been told I'm a dog." She laughs, and he holds out a hand. "Shall we?"

She places her hand in his outstretched out, and he tucks it inside his elbow, leading them to the dance floor.

She knows how to waltz, of course; she was in the Miss Mystic Court, after all. She's never danced with a baby bump in the way, but it's not as much of an intrusion as she'd expected it to be. His hand is high enough on her back to be proper, but his fingers grazing against where her skin is exposed above her strapless dress feels intimate nevertheless.

"Well, sweetheart," he says, with a grin, "do you still disapprove of balls?"

"Not as a rule," she replies, "but I'm still not sure this one's necessary."

Klaus laughs. "What a cynic you're turning out to be," he says.

Elena smiles. "This town brings it out in me," she replies. It's a joke, but she isn't joking, and he knows it; she still wants to leave Mystic Falls, no matter how much he might be enjoying this little game of family reunion his mother is playing.

"It suits you," he replies. "As does your dress, if I've failed to mention. You look exquisite."

"You did fail to mention, as a matter of fact," she tells him, and he laughs.

"Now that is unacceptable of me," he says. "Is there any way you can find it in your heart to forgive me?"

She smirks up at him. "I'll consider it," she says, and the music shifts into the next part of the waltz. Klaus spins her out onto the floor, and she finds herself landing in Elijah's arms.

"Elijah," she says, voice courteous if a little cold. Elijah's hand is high on her back, appropriate as can be, but she still feels as though there is something dangerous about his manner. "You gave a wonderful toast."

"Thank you, Elena," Elijah tells her, voice just as curt. "You look lovely tonight." They step together to the rhythm of the music. "As refreshing as your gift for the social graces is in light of the hours spent with my family today, I'm afraid there are more pressing matters I wish for us to discuss."

Elena raises her eyebrows. "Is that so?" she asks.

Elijah dips his head so that his mouth is next to her ear, and she looks down. "I happened to overhear the invitation Finn extended to you earlier this evening," he tells her.

"Happened to?" she quips. Elijah exhales – it's not quite a sigh, but it's as close to one as she imagines Elijah will permit himself. "Yes, what about it?"

Elijah hesitates, just for a moment. "I find myself doubting my mother's intentions ever since her… miraculous resurrection," he says. "I do not find it particularly easy to believe she has returned to the living for as noble a reason as she claims."

Elena laughs, but it comes out as more of a scoff. "Well, I wouldn't trust your mother as far as I could throw her, and considering I'm five months pregnant I couldn't throw anyone very far at all."

"And why is that?" Elijah asks. "Forgive me, but I don't believe you've had the chance to speak more than a handful of words to my mother, and I cannot imagine Niklaus being inclined to divulge much in the way of information about her, no matter the… liking he's taken to you, as it were."

"Liking," Elena says, with a small smile. "That's not a demeaning choice of words at all." She looks up and meets his eyes.

"I don't believe you've answered my question, Elena," Elijah tells her.

Elena tilts her head to the side, thinking about her conversation with Tatia and how she'll never tell anyone about it, especially not an original. "I don't believe I'm obliged to," she returns. "Mistrust of your mother has been bred into me. Call it the Petrova inheritance."

Elijah's lips curl up; he's almost smirking. "Well, you're rather cryptic, aren't you?" he asks.

"It's genetic," she replies.

Elijah laughs, just a little. "Be that as it may," he says, "I was hoping that you would accept the invitation to speak with her. I expect she intends to share her true intentions with you, and I'd be very much indebted to you if you'd discover them and them tell me what you've learned."

"Indebted?" Elena repeats, and smiles. "That's a big word." She examines him for a moment. "Yes, I'll do it," she says.

Elijah seems a little surprised, of all things. "You will?" he asks.

The dance is winding down; they've only moments left. "You're the reason I survived the sacrifice," she tells him, every word deliberate. "I don't owe you for that, but I am grateful. I'll return the favor."

"Thank you," Elijah says. He sounds like he means it.

. . .

The next time Klaus is distracted, Elena slips away and up the staircase, to where she knows Esther is waiting. She's lived in this house for weeks, now, but it feels bigger tonight, as she walks through the halls to an unknown destination, white skirts billowing out around her.

Finn greets her, stoic as ever, and she enters a room she's never entered before to find Esther.

"Elena," Esther says. There's a warmth to her voice that Elena just knows is affected. "I'm so glad you came."

Elena smiles and says nothing.

"Please, come in," Esther says, gesturing for Elena to join her at the table in the center of the room. Elena does, still saying nothing, footsteps as quiet as she can make them. "I'm so glad we can finally speak openly."

Elena nods, still smiling, still silent.

"Allow me to apologize for all the suffering my children have caused you," Esther says, carrying on without any prompting. "It is, of course, my fault, for turning them into what they now are, and I truly am very sorry."

There are a lot of things Elena could say to this, but she's here to find out what Esther wants, not to share any part of herself with Esther. "Thank you," she says, lips still curled in a smile.

"You've already lost so much of your life to this family," Esther says. The sympathy in her voice is cloying. "It feels cruel for me to ask you to give anything more, and yet, I still must do so."

Elena says nothing, and just looks at her. She knows the image she presents; she's all pretty Petrova face and big, dark doppelganger eyes, curious and concerned and ultimately inscrutable.

"Elena," Esther says, taking a step towards her. "I implore you not to repeat to my children what I am about to tell you."

Elena nods.

"I've returned to the living to right the wrongs I committed a thousand years ago," she tells Elena. "For a millennium, I've been forced to watch as my children have committed more and more terrible sins, and I must not allow them to continue." She nods at Elena's stomach. "You understand how much this pains me; what mother could wish to harm her children? And yet, it is what I must do. I love them, of course, as any mother would, but I cannot allow the monsters I have created to bring horror and suffering to any more innocent people." She takes another step towards Elena. "Do you understand, Elena?"

Elena understands, all right; she understands that Esther is attempting to manipulate her by appealing to the fact that Elena is pregnant, that she's painting herself as a victim when she isn't one, that for all that she insists on repeating Elena's name she hasn't been deterred for a moment by Elena's silence, as though Elena's own personhood has no value to her, just her face and her blood. "I do," Elena says.

Esther raises an eyebrow. "Do you?" she asks. "I know my son Niklaus has developed a fondness for you. It would be perfectly understandable if you'd come to return it."

"Klaus killed my mother," Elena says, and she imbues real pain into her voice – Isobel still hurts, and hurts deeply, though not for the reasons Elena's about to convince Esther she does. "He murdered her right in front of me and expected me to act like it was a gift, like I should be grateful, and I had to be because I had to make sure I didn't anger him and lead to him killing anyone else in my family." Elena swallows, blinks, looks down at the ground, and then meets Esther's gaze again after a long moment. "What is it you wanted to ask of me?"

"I'm so sorry, dear," Esther says. She sounds like she believes Elena; it's patronizing. Esther takes a heavy breath that Elena knows is fake. "My children believe I'm holding this ball to celebrate our reunion. But in truth, I've gathered them together to perform a ritual." She picks a long, thin knife up off the table. "The first step requires blood from the doppelgänger. Only a drop. Its essence will be in the champagne toast later on this evening. Will you do it, or shall I?"

Or shall I. It's a threat, a promise; for all that she's seeking Elena's permission, she'll take Elena's blood by force if she has to. Elena swallows, and stalls.

"How does it work?" she asks.

"Once my children have all drunk at the toast, they will be linked as one," says Esther. "If one falls, they all do."

"And what about my child?" Elena asks. She's stalling, looking for more information, but she also needs to know. "Will she fall too?"

"Oh, no, of course not," Esther says. She sounds as though this has never occurred to her. "No, of course. You simply must avoid drinking at the toast, and you and your child will not be linked to the rest. You have no need to worry."

Elena knows she doesn't have a choice, that she has to give her blood. What she can do is get out of here fast, and prevent Klaus from drinking at the toast. "Okay," she says, and pulls off her glove at the finger, extending her hand, and Esther pricks her finger and squeezes the blood into a glass chalice, full of some other liquid Elena doesn't recognize. "Thank you, Elena," Esther says. "My son will be wondering where you are."

Elena nods. "You promise my daughter won't be hurt?" she repeats.

"I promise," Esther says.

Elena leaves the room, escorted by Finn, and then Finn returns to his mother. It feels wrong, that she's being allowed to leave without being monitored, but it doesn't matter; once Elena tells Klaus that Esther's plotting against him, she'll be protected from any retaliation for her betrayal.

She stops walking for a moment, and realizes that she could just let it happen, let Klaus and Elijah and the others die, not have to worry about any of this, ever, for the rest of her life. She could be free. She could let Klaus die.

For all that she's been happy, as of late, forever is a very long time, and Klaus's good mood won't last. She's still afraid.

She closes her eyes. She doesn't want Klaus to die; no matter that a part of her – a very, very small part of her, it has to be small – might be just a little tempted. She doesn't want this.

She carries on walking, turns a corner, and runs into Elijah.

"Elena," he says, and she knows from the tone of his voice that he's been waiting for her. "How was your audience with my mother?"

"Fine," Elena says. "She just wanted to introduce herself properly." She shoots a significant look over her shoulder, and then another one at Elijah.

"So she can be trusted?" Elijah asks. She can tell he's picked up on her meaning; they might be listening.

"Of course," Elena says, and shakes her head. No.

"I'm glad to hear it," Elijah says, sounding genuinely pleased. "Shall I escort you back to the ballroom?"

"Please," Elena says.

They go to the study, instead, and Elena grabs paper and pen as soon as Elijah's locked the doors.

She's planning to kill you all, she writes. She took my blood and is going to put it in the champagne toast. If you drink it, you'll be linked. She'll kill one of you – probably Finn – and you'll all die.

Elijah reads her note, takes the pen from her, and writes. Does she suspect that you're divulging this information?

I don't think so, she writes back. Don't let anyone drink the toast. If everyone just pretends, we can tell them after the ball, and Esther won't know.

They divide and conquer – Elena takes Klaus, and Elijah takes Kol and Rebekah. When Elena returns to the ballroom, Klaus greets her with a kiss, and she leans into it, pulling his head down to hers so she can whisper in his ear, using her hair as a curtain. "Don't drink the champagne," she says under her breath, so quiet she's not even sure he can hear her. "It's a trap. I'll explain later."

She kisses Klaus again, so he doesn't fix her with a look that will give her away to Esther, and hopes he does what she says.

It's only a few minutes later that a waiter comes around with flutes of champagne on a tray. "Oh, I'll have one too," she says with a laugh, trying to sound breezy and flirtatious. "I'll just pretend to drink it. Feel less left out that way."

Klaus grabs them both glasses. She really didn't expect this much subtlety from him, but after Esther gives a short toast honoring the family, he lifts the glass to his lips and doesn't drink. She feels the pounding of her heart lessen, and only just stops herself from sighing in relief.

Instead, she stands on her tiptoes and grazes her lips across his cheek, light as a whisper.


	18. by that sin fell the angels

"It's all a trick," Elena says, the second the living room doors are closed. Kol's already taken it upon himself to find and burn some sage – "no, vampires can't do magic, darling, but that doesn't mean we can't make use of shortcuts here and there" – and he, along with Rebekah and Klaus, are assembled to listen to Elena and Elijah. They're all still in their formalwear – the guests have only just finished filing out. She should feel nervous, ordering around original vampires like this, but she finds she isn't at all. "Esther wants to kill you all, and Finn is in on it."

"That's a lie," Rebekah says.

"Sister," says Elijah, "listen."

Elena swallows. "I'm sorry, but it's true," she says. "She wants to use my blood to link all of you, so that killing one of you would kill you all, and Finn was prepared to let himself be killed to take down the rest of you. The blood was in the champagne; that's why we told you not to drink it."

A vase shatters behind Elena, and it takes her a moment to realize that it was Klaus who threw it.

"Am I to understand that you gave your blood to our mother knowing the power it would hold over us?" he asks. While he's speaking, he's sitting on the couch; a moment later he's directly in front of her.

She refuses to swallow, to show even that much hesitation. "She made it clear that I could either let her take my blood or she would take it by force," she says. "I figured that letting her take it without a fight would give me more time to warn you. The end result would be the same."

"Don't blame Elena, Niklaus," Elijah says, stepping forward, between her and Klaus.

Elena shoots a glare at him. "I can stand up for myself, you know,"

Elijah retreats at that. "Of course," he says. She can't tell if his tone is patronizing or just generally elitist. "Forgive me."

"Why?" Rebekah asks, still glued to her seat on the couch.

Elena can hear all the questions she isn't asking. Why doesn't she love me enough? What didn't I do? Where did I go wrong? "She was on the other side for a thousand years," she says as an answer. "Supernatural purgatory. She – I think it got into her brain." She doesn't think that's what it is at all, of course. She thinks Esther is cruel and unfeeling and awful, but she doesn't think that will sit well with Rebekah. Better to believe that the woman who wants you dead isn't really your mother, is some twisted version of her that isn't real, rather than to know your mother is as awful as they come.

"And what exactly do you mean for us to do with this information?" Kol asks. Elena blinks, and looks over at him.

"Not trust your mother, for one," she says, voice dry.

Elijah steps in again, here. "We've never before had to fear for our immediate survival, with the exception of Mikael. It is imperative that we understand that our existence is in danger."

"I think everyone understands that part," Elena says. She didn't mean for her voice to come out so dismissive, but she doesn't care to try and correct her tone. "Look, all I know is that your mother thinks she needs to kill you all to repent for creating vampires in the first place. I don't know if that's something she believes on her own, or something all the dead witches have made her believe, or what, but I know she's planning to act on it." She takes a deep breath. "Would I really warn you about a nonexistent threat?"

Kol laughs at this, and looks to Klaus. "Honestly, brother, I don't think she would," he says, grinning. "Clearly someone's taught you to charm the ladies in the century."

"Yes, thank you, Kol," Klaus says in a flat voice. He isn't right next to Elena anymore – he's a fair distance away, actually – but he's still staring at her so intently she doesn't think she could look away if her life depended on it. "You're entirely certain our mother is trying to kill us, Elena?"

His tone is dangerous – the very use of her name is dangerous. She swallows.

"Yes," she says.

Klaus roars, and in one swift motion tears the cushions of the sofa to shreds, then picks up the sofa and launches it through a wall. Elena doesn't want to rush up to him, but she can't help saying "Klaus, the privacy spell," to which he just growls in response.

One of the hybrids Klaus has standing guard looks in through the hole in the wall. "What's going on?" he asks, and Elena only has time to be just so grateful that it isn't Tyler, because in the space of a second Klaus has crossed the room, pulled the hybrid in by the collar of his shirt, and buried his hand in the hybrid's chest.

"Klaus–" Elena says, even though it's useless, it's so useless. Klaus yanks the hybrid's heart out of his body, and he falls to the ground, dead. A moment later, Klaus is in front of her, his face inches from hers.

"And why did you talk to her?" he asks, his voice raised to almost a roar. "Did you want to hear it, that she wanted us dead? Did you want to help her? Did your little friends convince you–"

"Are you kidding me?" she returns. "I'm the one telling you! I went to talk with her because I wanted to know what she was up to, don't you dare accuse me of–"

Klaus breaks a table in half, and she flinches.

"Niklaus," Elijah says, "we all share your anger, but–"

Klaus throws a table leg through another wall.

By the time the fit is done, the kitchen and living room are both completely and utterly destroyed. He doesn't come to bed that night – she forces herself to believe that he won't resent her for being the bearer of bad news, that his anger isn't at all aimed at her.

Esther disappears from the house before anyone can find or confront her. Finn is nowhere to be found, either, though according to Klaus he's been spotted in the streets of various cities, acclimatizing to the 21st century.

A thousand years in that box. Elena can't even begin to imagine it, how much the world has changed, how much the people who were once familiar to him have changed, how it would feel to wake up after a millennium of darkness. She doesn't like Finn – she thinks he's a pain in the ass, actually, and from what she's seen of him he makes Elijah look unpretentious – but then one day Klaus comes home with Finn's body in tow, having tracked him down and daggered him, and it scares her, that this is Klaus's brother and Klaus left him in a box for a thousand years without a second thought and is now going to throw him in there again. No one will tell her what Finn did to deserve that, other than that he's dull; she doesn't want to imagine what might happen if Klaus stops finding her entertaining.

It should be fascinating, living with Klaus's siblings, with all their knowledge and experience and the decades of history they can relate to her, but really it feels more demanding than anything. It turns out knowing about the past isn't nearly as important as Elena had always thought; being aware of her present is a far more valuable skill. She lives surrounded by monsters, in a house where the waking world holds more nightmares than her dreams; knowledge is the only power open to her.

She's been living with and frightened of Klaus for so long that communicating with anyone, be they friend, original, or foe, feels like a surprise test.

She always passes, of course, but that's beside the point.

. . .

"I'm just saying," Rebekah tells her, as the credits to Pride & Prejudice scroll their way down the screen, "Elizabeth Bennett would never have caught Mr. Darcy's eye had her hair been that horrid. I don't care how witty she's meant to be. It would have been a disgrace."

"Elizabeth Bennett never caught Mr. Darcy's eye because she's made up," Elena says, rolling her eyes. "She's a character. And the movie isn't supposed to be historically accurate, that's not what makes it good."

"I don't think it's particularly good at all," Rebekah says, voice haughty.

"Yes, you do," Elena says, with a small smile. "You threw the remote through the TV halfway through Casablanca because you thought Humphrey Bogart's head was too big for his body."

"I stand by that," Rebekah tells her. "It was an affront to my eyes."

"I'm sure you would have lived," Elena says with a laugh. "And you wouldn't have sat through the movie if you didn't like it."

"I said it wasn't particularly good," Rebekah says. "I didn't say anything about not liking it."

Elena grins at her. "It's a great movie, and you loved it," she says, and turns off the TV.

Rebekah doesn't answer her, and Elena looks over to see Rebekah slumped forward, blonde hair in her face and almost brushing the floor, trembling just slightly.

"Rebekah?" she asks. She reaches out to touch her shoulder, but stops herself at the last minute; touching a deadly monster when you don't know what's wrong with her doesn't seem like the brightest idea. "Rebekah, what's going on?"

Rebekah doesn't respond, and Elena scoots backwards on the couch, just to be safe.

She's moments from going looking for another Original for help, or advice, or even protection when a strange shudder seems to go through Rebekah, from her head down through her back and legs, like a bowling ball rolling down the length of her body, and then Rebekah sits up, posture stiff.

"Rebekah?" Elena asks. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," Rebekah says, words stiff. "Of course." Her form relaxes, just a little, and she smiles at Elena. "Are you hungry?"

Elena frowns. "Not particularly," she says. She is, of course, hungry, she always is, but she wants a moment to observe Rebekah first, to see what just happened.

"Of course you're hungry," Rebekah says, "you're pregnant, you must be starving. Want to go out and grab a bite?"

"No, thank you," Elena says.

"Don't be silly," Rebekah says, standing.

There's something familiar about the way Rebekah moves; there's something even more familiar about how wrong her movements look in her body.

This isn't Rebekah, Elena realizes. Her stomach drops.

"Okay, fine," she says, and forces a laugh. "I'd kill for a burger."

"Let's go, then," not-Rebekah says.

Elena grins. "Great," she says. "I'll run up and change."

She's got her phone in her hands by the time she's on the stairs and is dialing Klaus's number before she's in her room, but it's too late. The second she's pushed open the door, she finds herself pinned against the opposite wall, a hand clamped over her mouth.

"Now, Elena," says Esther out of Rebekah's mouth, looking at Elena through Rebekah's eyes, "let's be sensible."

. . .

"So what is this, Viking meet-the-inlaws?" Elena asks, when she's regained the power of speech; she throws out the words like a challenge because she's afraid of her voice trembling. Esther used Rebekah's body to compel her out of the house – the house Klaus must have put protective spells around, of course – and to stay quiet, and the moment she was out of the house the world went black and her voice disappeared from her mouth like this was The Little Mermaid. It's only been minutes since she could see again, as though a blindfold had been ripped off from over her eyes and vision had flooded back to her; Esther stands about ten feet in front of her, in her own body.

They're in caves; she isn't sure which caves these are, but there are strange scratched symbols on the walls, and it smells old and dark and cold. She knows there's nothing touching her, but it still feels as though something is crawling up her back, like shadow spider legs on the back of her neck. She doesn't try to fight against her restraints; her hands are bound, and all she'll do if she tries to escape is exhaust herself. Still, she's trapped, held hostage, and she isn't just herself; she doesn't know how it's possible, to care so much about a person who isn't yet a person, to be so protective of a human who doesn't exist, but here she is, and she's never feared putting her life on the line but this child's life – this fetus's life, it isn't even a child yet – is somehow worth everything.

"I'm sorry that this had to be so unceremonious," Esther says. It's Esther, now, in her real body, speaking in a voice that Elena knows to hate without even really knowing why. "I only hope you can understand one day why I had to remove you from that house. I wish there had been another way."

"No, you don't," says Elena. Her teeth are clenched so tight it's hard to speak through them; all she knows is the words she has to say, and she's never known any way but to keep pushing forward until she does was has to be done. "You don't care one way or another. You don't care at all."

She doesn't care at all, just the way Isobel didn't care at all. Esther's human –she's a witch, sure, but either way she's a person, she doesn't have any sort of switch, and yet still there's something dead in her gaze, some lack of humanity underscoring every word she says.

Elena refuses to think of it anymore, because if she thinks too long or too hard, she'll start to retch, and she doesn't think she'll stop until every muscle, organ, and bone is on the ground in front of her.

"So what do you want?" she asks. It's an obvious question, sure, but it's the first thing that comes to mind and she has to ask something.

Esther shakes her head. "I'm so sorry you've been caught up in all of this, Elena," she says. "I never meant for you to be."

"I'm the doppelganger," Elena replies. "You always meant for me to be caught up in all of this. Otherwise, why would I need to be sacrificed to break the curse? Why would my blood be needed to create hybrids?"

The pained look on Esther's face is so clearly fabricated that it hurts Elena, deep in the pit of her stomach; or maybe that's the child, kicking and squirming, somehow knowing that something is terribly wrong even though it can't possibly know what. "Every spell must be balanced by nature," Esther says. "Had I been able to seal Niklaus's werewolf side for all time, I would have."

"And why is that?" Elena asks.

Esther blinks. "I beg your pardon?" she asks.

"Why did you want to seal his werewolf side?" Elena doesn't know how, or why, but somewhere inside of her she can feel a weakness in Esther's mind, at this question; she can feel Esther's pulse, here, and she doesn't know how she knows this but she knows she needs to push as hard as she possibly can.

"He was dangerous, Elena," Esther says, with a heavy sigh. "He is dangerous."

"He wasn't a monster, then," Elena says.

Esther fixes her with such a pitying gaze that Elena thinks she might self-immolate on the spot. "Elena," she says, her voice so gentle it makes Elena's skin crawl, "I love my son, but he's become a beast, a demon beyond redemption. If you knew what he has done–"

"He murdered me," Elena says, lifting her chin. "He tore his fangs into my skin and drank my blood until I died. He cared about me, and he killed me anyway, because my death was worth more to him than anything I had to offer in my life. I know that. I am that. Don't you dare lecture me about what a monster he is."

Esther hasn't looked at her this whole time – she's given Elena looks, but she hasn't really looked at Elena, hasn't met Elena's eyes properly, hasn't seen her. Now, Esther looks at her, takes steps towards her so that her eyes seem to penetrate Elena's soul, ripping through every layer of defense and seeing straight to Elena's heart.

Her eyes look like Isobel's. They aren't quite the same color, but they're pale and glass-like and clear as day; there's no feeling behind them. Elena remembers searching Isobel's eyes for something feeling, desperate like a drowning man gasping for air, and coming up with nothing to show for it; she remembers looking into Mikael's ancient face and seeing no more depth in his eyes than in those of a statue; she looks into Esther's eyes, and she does not blink.

She thinks she feels the ground vibrating beneath her. The earth seems to roar, under her feet, through her legs, all the way up her spine.

"Do you love my son, Elena?" Esther asks.

Elena feels heady for a moment, like she's had too many glasses of whiskey, like the whole world has become to real to hold up, just for a moment, and then it all lifts, and she's as light as air.

"Almost," she replies. There's no feeling to her tone; her words are suspended in the air like they're walking a tightrope, but they're firm, like an acrobat certain he'll make his way to the other side. "Sometimes. Just enough."

There's something resembling confusion in Esther's eyes, and something resembling doubt; Elena leans up as far as she can despite the ropes binding her and lifts her chin, close enough to Esther's face that she's sure Esther will feel Elena's words against her skin, and says: "Do you envy me for that?"

The ground isn't growling beneath her, and the air isn't vibrating around her. Someone is roaring, screaming, too far for her to know it, and yet she knows it all the same. "You don't have to answer that for me," she says, and smirks. She knows how Katherine looks when she smirks, knows how it would feel to smirk like Katherine does, and knows that right now she looks like something entirely different. "I already know you do."

Klaus is on his way. She knows that if he's coming to fight he's bringing the hounds of hell with him, whatever form they may take, and that knowledge gives her a nerve, a daring thrill she'd long forgotten she had.

"Echidna," she says, and grins as she speaks, feeling feral as she does. "I'm sure you know who she is – or were you dead too long?" She laughs even though it isn't funny. "In Greek Mythology, they call her the mother of monsters. She was a beautiful woman and a hideous monster all at once. She was killed by a servant of Hera's, did you know? She's remembered for nothing but the horrors she created."

Esther's mouth curls up into a smirk – it looks like a weapon, Elena thinks, like something conjured up to fight a threat rather than pulled out from within. "In Greek Myth, they call Helen the 'face that launched a thousand ships,'" Esther says. "The woman who started a war between men far above her worth. Did you know that?"

Elena smiles, open-mouthed. "Yes," she says, still smiling so that all her teeth – her white, straight, human teeth – are on display. "I did."

There's a crashing, then, and Elena knows it's real before it happens. The world seems to shudder around her, and then just like that there are rock walls crumbling around her. Esther looks around, startled and afraid, and Elena's smiles turns into a grin she knows is too wide to be pretty. The falling rocks could kill her, and she knows they could kill her, yet for some reason she can't find it in her to be afraid; her life may be at risk, but this still feels like a victory.

"Did you really think you could try to kill me and no one would care?" Elena asks.

Esther shakes her head, and then she speaks, and the words fall out of her mouth so quickly that it seems like she's afraid of not getting them out fast enough. "My intention wasn't to kill you, Elena," she says.

Elena lifts an eyebrow. "It wasn't?" she asks.

Esther staggers towards her, and though she moves as though she's alive something in the motion of her joints makes Elena realizes, suddenly and horribly, that Esther is dead, that her body is dead, that her body's lain in a coffin a thousand years and should not host a speaking, breathing person. "I have never meant you any harm, Elena," Esther says, voice lower than it's been yet. "You're in danger. You are a danger, even though you do not know it yet–"

"Please tell me you aren't talking about my potential," Elena says, because she's heard this speech, in movies, on TV, in books – she knows it. She'd expected better.

"Not your potential," says Esther, and she leans forward, clutching the arms of the chair Elena's bound to. "The potential you carry – the child, Elena, it cannot be allowed to–"

There's another crashing noise, and Esther's head darts around to look for it, and while Elena may be tied up by rope, she's still a former star cheerleader; she bends up her knee and then kicks out her leg to hit Esther right in the middle of her stomach. Esther keels, and Elena looks to her right, to where the rock wall has collapsed and she can see just enough of the cavern outside to spot the black curls and green eyes that she's know anywhere, and it's Bonnie, it's finally Bonnie, Bonnie who she'd trust before any Original a thousand times over, and just like that the ropes binding her come loose and she stands as fast as she can and backs away from Esther, further into the cave. She doesn't turn her back to Esther until she's halfway around a corner, and then she turns and runs.

She doesn't know where she's running to, but she knows she isn't running blindly; there are markings on the wall and scattered stones along the floor, enough that she can tell people have come this way recently. Someone must have come this way not long ago, which means something must be down this way, and it's not long until she finds a chest – more like a safe than a chest, really – sitting on the ground.

The Lockwood family crest is on it. She doesn't think about what that means, just pries open the lid and lifts it with every ounce of strength she has to her name, and then digs around in it's contents.

The walls seem to be shivering around her, as though they can feel, and Elena knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is magic, that this is Esther. Her hands grasp onto anything she can feel in the case; there are stakes, so many stakes, and at least one crossbow, and what feels like a bag of seeds that have to be vervain, and finally, finally, something that feels like a gun.

It could be packed with wooden bullets. Elena doesn't care. She's a good southern girl and her best friend's mother is the town sheriff; she can shoot a gun, and she may not have a medical degree but she's pretty sure that anything tearing its way through your throat or skull or heart will kill you.

She holds the base of the gun and waits. She takes deep breath; she needs to be steady for this. She's never actually shot someone before, but she's certain she can do it.

Esther comes into view, and Elena doesn't hesitate. She's heard talk before, of how hard it is to make the kill, to pull the trigger, but no sliver of human empathy resonates with her; she pulls the trigger and sends a bullet, a real bullet, right through Esther's eyes before she has the chance to second guess herself. Esther's reanimated corpse falls to the ground, and Elena pulls herself to her feet, knees trembling beneath her, and looks down at the body spread in front of her.

She doesn't feel remorse. She doesn't feel anything. She wishes she did.

She stumbles her way back out of the cave, prying through the rough stone separating her from everyone who's come from her, and there's Klaus, face veined as monstrous as ever; she falls into him, exhausted, relieved.

"Tomorrow," she tells him, when she's breathing steadily enough to speak.

Klaus pulls away to look down at her. "Pardon, sweetheart?" he asks.

She looks up at him and meets his gaze. "We're going back to California," she says. "We're leaving tomorrow."

Klaus laughs at that, and despite everything something in his laugh feels happy, even though he has no reason to be. "Very well, sweetheart," he says. "We leave tomorrow."

Elena doesn't stay awake long enough to see her way out of the caves. She falls asleep, weight leaning against him, head resting in the crook of his shoulder.


	19. but just ourselves and immortality

She hadn't really expected Klaus to go back to California without a fight, but she's also at the end of her rope, steely determination in the set of her jaw and ice cold certainty tracing the neural pathways of her brain; she's always picked her battles and she's chosen this one and she knows without a shadow of a doubt that if they have this fight she'll win. Maybe Klaus can see that too – or maybe he's realized she's right, and there's no future for her in this town. It doesn't matter why he's had a change of heart, though. The next day, he has hybrids or compelled workers or _someone_ pack up their bags while she goes off and says her goodbyes.

"You'd better come back for Christmas," Jeremy says, hugging her as tightly as he dares considering how pregnant she is. "I don't care what he says, you're coming back."

Elena laughs. "I'll work on it," she says. She knows she'll come back; she's still possessed by that gritty certainty, and she knows that after she nearly got killed she can get more small favors out of Klaus than usual, but she also knows that this is temporary; and besides, she never wants her family or friends to know how things work between her and Klaus. She knows they could never understand, knows that they're happier thinking of him as the monster under her bed than trying to wrap their minds around power plays and a thousand years of destiny and a life built on bargains, and she won't take that away from them; she also knows that what exists between them is _hers_ , and she's not giving it to anyone else, not for a second.

There's one more person she wants to see before she leaves – no, that isn't true, she doesn't _want_ to, but she does need to.

She gets Caroline to come with her, because Caroline's the only person who won't judge her too harshly for this, who… she won't understand, but she'll be okay with not understanding, and as much as Elena would like to go alone she needs someone to open the tomb.

"Katherine?" she calls, once Caroline has left. She knows Katherine will have been desiccating for months and months by now, probably won't even be able to move, but she has to try, anyway.

It seems to take forever for her to get a response, but then, after what must be minutes, she hears a voice so rough it almost doesn't sound like a voice at all; it's like ice breaking, but lower, raspier, croaking. "Hello, Elena," Katherine says from inside the tomb.

Elena can't see Katherine, but she expects that's because Katherine can't make her way to the front of the tomb.

She isn't blind to the irony of this, to the déjà vu of the whole situation; she still reaches into her bag and grabs the water bottle of blood she'd packed earlier today. She kneels down. "Think fast," she says, and rolls the water bottle into the tomb.

Her rolling was more forceful than she'd expected, because it disappears into the depths of the tomb. She sits and waits, then, for a long while; she can hear scratching sounds, against the walls and the ground, what must be Katherine trying to make her way over to wherever the water bottle is. It's maybe ten minutes by the time she hears crinkling plastic, and it's only moments later that she hears a deep gasping breath, like that a drowning woman who's finally found air.

"Feeling better?" Elena calls.

She hears a throaty laugh, but this is a familiar rasping, now. "I take it you want something?" Katherine asks. Elena hears footsteps. "This setup is just a little bit familiar, don't you think?"

"I don't need anything from you," Elena says.

"Then why are you here?" Katherine asks. Katherine wouldn't usually sound this angry this quickly, but then she's been locked up and starving for months and months.

"Call it curiosity," Elena says, and then Katherine's face comes into view, and she freezes.

"You're –" Katherine stares at her like she's a ghost. "How are you here?" she asks at last, tone sharp. "What happened at the sacrifice? You didn't kill Klaus, or I wouldn't still be in here."

"The sacrifice went as planned," Elena says. "Elijah gave me an elixir that allowed me to survive it."

Katherine laughs wryly. "God, of _course_ he did," she says, and then her laughing goes from unenthused to something else altogether, something Elena doesn't recognize at all; it rises uncontrollably into something wild, something that's almost a cackle, something hysterical. Katherine slides to the ground, back against the wall of the tomb. "Of course he did," she says again. "Of _fucking_ course."

When she calms down, she looks over at Elena, and raises an eyebrow. "You still found the time to get yourself knocked up?" she asks.

"It's Klaus's," Elena says.

Katherine snorts. "What does that mean?" she asks. There's still a feral smile on her face, a hint of that laughter on the verge of breaking out.

"Klaus broke the curse," Elena says. "He's a werewolf now, too. Hybrids can have children."

Katherine stares at her for a long moment. Elena looks into her eyes and sees more than she's ever wanted to see; sees herself tired and afraid and angry, sees herself trapped and lost and losing her mind, sees that knife-edge precision of thought cutting through the world to put pieces together. She sees in Katherine's eyes the moment she figures it all out; she wonders if anyone's ever looked closely enough at her own eyes to see the same.

Katherine's smile is gone; in its place is the tiniest hint of a smirk, something utterly controlled and utterly Katherine. She shakes her head. "You're an idiot, Elena Gilbert," she says.

"I'm a Petrova," Elena replies, with what she knows to be the same smirk on her lips as well. "It's inevitable."

She meets Klaus back at the mansion, and he's got his car in the middle of the driveway, and is waiting for her with a smirk fixed on his face. She rolls her eyes at nothing in particular and laughs, then makes her way over to him.

"Are you ready, sweetheart?" he asks, opening her door for her.

She grins up at him. "You say that as though I'm the one who needed convincing," she tells him.

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear and kisses her. His kisses are always too possessive to really be sweet, but it's somewhere in that ballpark. She smiles against his mouth, and then, a moment later, they're interrupted by a loud " _a-hem_."

She looks over at the front of the house, where Rebekah is standing, looking put out as can be, and standing next to a packed suitcase. "Rebekah?" she asks.

"Have I not been on my best behavior, Nik?" she asks, and stomps down the driveway towards them. "Elena?"

"Have you gone mad again, sister?" Klaus asks. He sounds more affectionate than he probably wants to.

Rebekah sighs loudly, exasperated. "Do you really mean to leave me again while you jet off to California?" she asks. "Kol's taken off god knows where, and Elijah certainly doesn't plan on staying in this rubbish little town." She turns to Elena. "I thought you found me tolerable, at the very least."

 _Oh,_ Elena thinks. "Rebekah, I'm so sorry, I'd forgotten in all the chaos that you wanted to come," she says. "Of course you're welcome."

"Is she, now?" Klaus asks. His voice isn't dangerous, just amused, but there's the slight, ever-present edge in it that never lets Elena forget how little he enjoys other people making decisions for him.

She looks up at him, and bats her eyelashes in mock innocence, a hint of a smile playing at the corner of her lips. She could look convincingly innocent if she wanted to, and she could keep a straight face through anything, but she isn't going for real innocence; after a moment, Klaus laughs. "The last trimester is very hormonal, you know," she tells him. "Do you really want to be my only choice in companion when I get the overwhelming need to marathon chick flicks and eat ice cream for hours on end?"

There's nothing wrong with chick flicks, of course, but Elena's pretty sure it'll be _Gone With The Wind_ she wants to watch over and over again, in all it's four-hour long glory. Still, her words have the desired effect; Klaus laughs again, and then turns to Rebekah. "Would you like to come to California, sister?" he asks her.

Rebekah rolls her eyes. "Thank you," she says.

Klaus, still grinning, plants another kiss against Elena's temple and then makes for the driver's seat. Rebekah picks up her bag and tosses it in the trunk without the slightest bit of effort.

Before Rebekah can get in the car, though, Elena turns towards her. "By the way, Rebekah, I don't find you tolerable," she says.

Rebekah's face seems to fall a little – Elena could have said her piece more directly, and in a much less clichéd fashion, but Rebekah's maybe the only person left on earth who'd fall for this, and besides, Elena didn't used to run the mean girl pack for nothing.

"I actually like you," she says, with a small smirk. Then she turns back and gets in the passenger seat, watching Rebekah's face through the rearview mirror.

Klaus leans over to her. "That wasn't particularly nice," he says in her ear, almost too quietly for her to hear.

Elena grins at him. "Newsflash: I'm not nice," she says. "Not always."

. . .

They settle into a rhythm, once they've returned to California; Rebekah takes her pick of bedrooms, and throws a mild fit about the fact that Klaus is keeping Finn's coffin in the house her niece will grow up in. Elena had made that same argument herself, but hearing Rebekah say it makes it feel real, somehow; she's having a daughter, and she's raising a daughter, her daughter is going to grow up somewhere, or many somewheres; there will be a house where her daughter takes her first steps, or says her first words. Some nights Elena lies awake for hours thinking about the fact that she's bringing a person into this world, a person who will grow up as Klaus's daughter, and while she could tell herself that becoming pregnant was an accident and once she became pregnant she didn't have a choice, another part of her can't shake the thought that had she been more selfless, more brave, more good, she would have taken the risk of Klaus's displeasure to spare an innocent child from the life she's bound to live.

She's being unfair; Klaus is a monster, but he isn't all monster, and as far as she can tell means to do well by their daughter. Still, meaning well doesn't mean doing well, and he's _Klaus_.

She knows she needs sleep for her health, but that doesn't mean it comes easily.

Her days are much more peaceful. Rebekah finds out about Elena's nursery decorating and throws herself into the task with the single-minded determination (and budget) of a woman who has been waiting for this opportunity for a millennium. Klaus is gone more often than he was before, and never brings hybrids in transition to the house, which comes as more of a relief than Elena would have expected it to.

She eats lunch with Rebekah most days, and the three of them dine together most evenings; privately, Elena thinks that these qualify as dinner theatre, from the dramatic arguments Klaus and Rebekah manage to have every single day. She finds it hilarious, except when she remembers that her daughter will be raised in the middle of this dysfunction, and then it turns her stomach so violently she has to excuse herself from the table.

It's not healthy for her to be stressed like this, not when she's so pregnant; but she's a doppelganger, and she was born to do this. A little stress won't stop her body from doing its predetermined duty.

. . .

In early December, during the eighth month of her pregnancy, Elena comes downstairs one morning to find someone sitting on a kitchen stool with his back to her. From the back, he looks a little like Klaus, but it's very clearly not Klaus; it takes her a moment before she realizes who it is.

"Lucien," she says, and Lucien turns to her and grins, then stands up.

"Ah, the lovely Elena," he says. "You look beautiful as ever, darling." He pauses and looks her up and down. "Beautiful and _pregnant_ , it would seem. My, my, how did this little development occur?"

Elena fixes him with her most charming smile. "The hybrid curse was broken a little while back," she tells him, and tosses her hair just so, revealing the scar on her neck where Klaus bit her. "Nature took its course."

"Nature, you say?" Lucien takes a few strides across the room to where she's standing. "And you survived the ordeal, as well. Fascinating." He reaches a hand towards her stomach.

She forces herself not to show how pissed she is at him reaching to touch her without asking, and grabs his hand with a firm grip and a smile. "Klaus doesn't appreciate anyone else touching, if you don't mind," she tells him, all manners despite the anger churning in her gut.

"Oh, of course," he says, and takes two steps back. "Forgive me; I wasn't thinking." He nods at her stomach. "Do you know the gender?" he asks.

"It's a surprise," she tells him. There's no reason not to tell him that she knows it's a girl, but she wants to give him as little as possible nonetheless; she doesn't know if he's a risk, but he's less of one the less he knows. "What brings you to California?" she asks. "When we last spoke, you didn't mention your work bringing you around here."

Lucien laughs. "Ah, right you are, Elena. I'm afraid this is a social call."

She blinks, and then giggles vapidly. "Klaus didn't tell me we were expecting visitors," she tells him. She speaks in the most domestic tone she can, like she's a housewife worried about setting enough places at the dinner table – she knows Lucien can tell it's a performance, but he can't call her on it, and she's going to get a better answer out of him no matter what it takes.

"This wasn't a planned visit, unfortunately," Lucien says. "Though I'm glad you're here. I was hoping I'd have a chance to speak with you."

What he means by that is that he'd waited to make sure he came by the house while Elena was the only one present. She isn't even certain how he got into the house – but then, he once said that he learned everything he knows from Klaus, and if _Klaus_ were in his shoes he'd find the staff member who owned the deed to the house and either kill them or compel them to invite him in, and either way it doesn't matter, not right now, not while Lucien is here.

"Well, I am a sparkling conversationalist," she tells him with a grin. "Or was there something in particular you wanted to talk about?"

"Oh, no, nothing in particular," Lucien says, and something about the way he speaks makes it clear that he's known all along that she's the doppelganger, and he knew before coming about her survival, about her pregnancy; he's been keeping tabs on her, and on Klaus. "I'm just glad of your company, as always."

"Well, then, I'm glad to be of service," she replies, and walks by him into the kitchen. "Can I offer you anything? I was about to pour myself a cup of coffee."

"Ah, coffee," Lucien says with a grin. "I never quite acquired a taste for it, unfortunately, but go on ahead."

Elena grabs her favorite mug and pours herself a cup of coffee – as unnecessary as she finds the having permanent staff, it is nice to always wake up to a fresh pot, all hot and ready. "How have you been?" she asks as she does so.

"Quite well, quite well," Lucien says, stepping closer to the kitchen. "Yourself?"

She may not be of pure Virginian breeding, but she's Southern born and raised; she can make perfect manners and hospitality seem like a slap in the face without blinking an eye. But she isn't just trying to bounce the etiquette ball back and forth until Klaus shows up; she wants to figure out what he wants.

Politeness isn't just a habit or a value; it's a weapon, and she knows that the surest way to get Lucien to spill more than he intends to is to let perfect etiquette slide in favor of joking familiarity.

"You mean, apart from the back pain and morning sickness?" she says with a grin. Lucien laughs at that. "I've been pretty good. I miss alcohol, though."

"God, nine months without drinking," Lucien says. "I can't even imagine. Have you already got your first drink planned?"

Elena laughs. "Please, I've already chosen the bottle of bourbon."

"Straight from the finest distillery in Kentucky, I hope?" he asks.

Elena mock pouts. "I'm hurt that you even have to ask," she says.

Lucien laughs again, and there's an undertone of satisfaction to his laugh – he feels at ease, just as she'd intended. "And how is Nik?" he asks.

Elena smiles, all earnestness. "He's good," she says, and sits at the kitchen island. "Busy, of course, but good."

"Running with wolves hasn't worn him out yet?" asks Lucien. His tone is joking, but it's clear that he's probing, putting out feelers to see how she'll react to the reveal that he has this knowledge.

She grins. "Well, thing is, he _is_ a wolf now," she says.

"Right, of course, of course," Lucien says. "How could I forget?"

"Spend enough time with him and you never will again," she tells him, smiling around the rim of her coffee mug. "Trust me. He loves to remind people."

"Duly noted," Lucien says, grinning. He takes a step towards Elena. "Does he take you with him, when he travels?"

Elena thinks that question over as quickly as possible. _Travels_. That had been what Klaus had asked her to get out of Lucien, back when they'd gotten drinks with him in New York, all those months ago. Klaus had wanted to know where Lucien had travelled lately – because Lucien was looking into wolves, because Klaus wanted Lucien's intel on where to find wolves, and if Lucien's asking her about Klaus's travels he's probably after the same thing, finding more and more wolf packs. She doesn't have any idea what he wants with them, but she doesn't want him to get it, at least not because of her.

"No, he never does," she says, and bites her lip. "Never even tells me where he's going, actually," she mutters, as though it's an afterthought. She's going for thoughtful and sad and a little bitter, and she knows she nails it.

"That must be awfully difficult," Lucien says.

Elena looks up at him, as though his words pulled her out of a daze. "Hm?" she asks.

"Oh, you know." Lucien takes another step towards her; there's a smugness to his stance. "The fragility of it all, of Nik; his rage and his tantrums and his narcissism. It's an impossible game, always having to step on eggshells for fear of provoking him."

Elena blinks and forces her vapid smile to stay plastered to her face, forces her heartbeat to stay even instead of racing like it wants to. "I don't know what you mean," she says, even though neither of them believe her.

Lucien laughs cruelly. "You're a smart girl, Elena," he says. "You know as well as I that this… relationship of yours isn't sustainable. One day, you'll say the wrong thing, or make the wrong move, and this paper thin facsimile of a life you've built for yourself will all come crumbling down."

Elena looks at him, and doesn't say anything for a long moment. Finally, she pulls her lips into a smirk. "Thank you for your input," she says, in a voice sweet enough to rot teeth.

Seconds later, the front door swings open, and she looks over to see Klaus come striding into the house. "Morning, sweetheart," he says with a grin. He walks into the kitchen, and then comes to a stop when he sees Lucien. "And we have company!" he says. "Wish you'd called ahead, mate; wouldn't have left you waiting."

"Oh, no harm done," Lucien says, smiling like the cat who caught the canary. "Elena's been a charming hostess, keeping me company until you arrived."

"Is that so?" Klaus asks.

Elena laughs. "He's as much of a scoundrel as you said he was," she tells him, and stands, grabs her cup of coffee and crosses the room to him. "I'll leave the two of you to your business while I go rest my delicate, feminine sensibilities."

Klaus laughs. "Have you scandalized my Elena, Lucien?" he asks.

"I may never recover," she says, wide-eyed. He laughs again, and she leans up to place a kiss on his cheek that lasts longer than it would have had Lucien not been watching.

She heads up to the nursery and sits in the middle of the floor, surrounded by blank walls with only taped-on paint samples and catalogue pages to decorate them, and stares at them until she can picture the finished nursery again, the place where she'll sing her daughter to sleep and see her figure out how to crawl.

She thinks about the future she _is_ sure of until she can remember how to breathe.

. . .

They do go back to Mystic Falls for Christmas. They don't go for long, of course; they fly into Richmond on the 24th and out on the 26th. It's not as much time as her family wants, and she lets them blame it on Klaus, but selfishly she knows it's all the time she can bear in this town. It's home and she loves it; she also knows she can never live there again.

She's enormously pregnant by the new year, but not so pregnant that Klaus can't find a stunning floor-length dress that fits her like it was made for her – and it may well have been, for all she knows – and organize a ridiculously sumptuous feast of a dinner for the two of them and Rebekah in a private room in the most exclusive restaurant in the Bay Area, with a perfect view of the fireworks that go off all up and down the beach the moment the clock strikes midnight.

January's arrival has Elena feeling more grateful for the mild weather than she'd expected, when Klaus had first listed the reasons he'd chosen a home in California; she doesn't go as far as to thank him for his foresight, but she's pretty sure he knows all the same. She's too pregnant for sex, now – not according to any doctor but according to Klaus, who really has read too much about pregnancy and is certain that if she so much as walks down the stairs too vigorously she'll induce labor. At first, she makes a game of it, trying to get Klaus to break in his convictions; as time goes on, though, she finds she's lost the urge, at least for now. She's content to just lounge about the house all day in expensive maternity nightgowns, eating endless amounts of greek yogurt (because of _course_ her doppelganger biology has her craving foods that just happen to be important sources of nutrients for the baby) and going for leisurely walks along the beach.

"What are we going to name her?" Klaus asks, ten days before Elena's due.

Elena is lying back on the pillows of the couch to rest her sore back, nursing an enormous mug of decaf coffee. She rolls her eyes at him. "You finally think to ask?" she says.

"I take it you've given this some thought?" he returns, coming to sit next to her. She lifts her legs just enough that he can slide under them, and then rests them on his lap.

She laughs, and then winces when the baby kicks harder than usual. "I want to call her Miranda," she says, after a moment.

She's been thinking about how she's going to float the idea for ages; she's never thought he cared all that much about the baby's name, but she knows he cares about his own authority, his position as the decision-maker. After everything, she thinks he'll respond better if she's direct and detached about this.

Klaus raises an eyebrow. "Miranda?" he asks.

"My mother's name," she tells him. She wishes she were surprised that he didn't know.

"Your mother's name was Isobel," he says, as though he thinks she's somehow confused.

"No, not my birth mother, my mom," Elena tells him. "Miranda."

Klaus wrinkles his nose. "It's a little too alliterative, though, isn't it?" he says. "Miranda Mikaelson."

Elena raises an eyebrow. "Mikaelson?" she asks. She can't quite keep the laugh out of her voice.

"She'll take my name, of course," Klaus says.

Elena wants to laugh, but instead she scoffs. "The name of the father you hate?" she says. "Why do you want to pass on his name?" She pretends to hesitate before making her next point, even though she's had it in her back pocket for months. "Besides, in Viking culture, wouldn't that make her Klausdottir or something?"

"You think it should be Gilbert, then?" Klaus asks. There's something derisive in his tone.

"Both my fathers are Gilberts," she returns. "And I love my dad. I want to pass it down."

Klaus sighs. "I'll consider it," he tells her.

She laughs. "No, it's decided," she tells him.

He ignores that. "Miranda," he says. "I suppose it is a nice literary reference."

"Of course that's what matters to you," Elena says, though she's pleased nonetheless. "And for a middle name, I was thinking Grace."

"You want to give her a middle name?" Klaus asks.

She doesn't answer the question. "My father's name was Grayson," she says instead. "So I thought, you know, Grace."

"Hm," Klaus says. "To be quite honest, I prefer Miranda Grace to Miranda Gilbert."

"Grace would be her middle name, not her last name," Elena tells him.

He smiles at her. "Does she really need a family name, sweetheart?" he asks. "You've pointed out the flaws with Mikaelson, I find Gilbert rather common, and we're hardly going to call her Petrova, now, are we?"

"I want Gilbert on the birth certificate," she says.

Klaus rolls his eyes. "I hardly care about the birth certificate, sweetheart. I never had one."

"That's because you're ancient," she replies, but smiles to herself. She'd hoped for as much; she knows Klaus will never consider the name on the birth significant real, but it's real to her, and that she gets to pass it down after everything means more than she wants to dwell on. "Miranda Grace Gilbert," she says.

"Miranda Grace," Klaus corrects.

"Whatever," she tells him. She strokes a hand along her stomach, and thinks, _Miranda._ Baby Miranda gurgling in her crib; little Miranda toddling behind her through the aisles of the grocery store; Miranda carrying a backpack off to her first day of school.

They're idealistic images, of course; Elena may never step foot in a grocery store again, and she has no idea whether Klaus will let Miranda go to a real school. Still, Elena can picture her, with Elena's dark Petrova hair, and Klaus's clear blue eyes, and the smile of a girl the world will never have the chance to burn.


	20. the things we love

Elena goes into labor on her due date.

Of course she does. This is what she was born for.

Her water breaks while she's in bed, and she wakes up to a soaked sheet underneath her. She's worried for a moment that she's peed herself, but it doesn't take long for her to realize what's going on, and then she's not worried anymore. She's terrified.

She leans over and shakes Klaus, hard. Her lungs are burning; she's hyperventilating. She's not ready for this.

"What is it?" Klaus groans, propping himself up on his forearm.

"I think I'm going – I think –" She can't get the words out, but Klaus is alert in an instant, and leans over to turn on the lamp. She's sure she's a sight, clutching her stomach, seconds from tears.

"Elena," he says, and then he slides an arm around her waist. "Elena, breathe, you're okay," he tells her. "Elena, just breathe."

He rubs soothing circles on her back, and she leans her head against his bare chest and tries to match her breaths to his, slow and steady, until she feels like she can think straight again.

"Oof," she says, and grips his arm. The wave of pain passes, and she takes a few deep breaths. "Oh." She clenches her jaw.

"I take it you think you're going into labor, sweetheart?" Klaus asks. "These could be false contractions. I've read that those are common."

"Yeah, I don't think your water breaks when you have Braxton-Hicks," Elena replies. "I think she's – oh my god, I'm going to have a daughter."

Klaus laughs. "That's hardly news, love."

"No, I mean, now, today, oh my _god_ ," she says. She doesn't know how to put it into words, or if she even _wants_ to put it into words for Klaus, really: that she's about to become a mother; that after today she will never not be a mother again.

"I supposed we'd better get you to the hospital, then," Klaus says.

"The hospital?" Elena asks.

Klaus laughs. "Don't worry, sweetheart. I've arranged for a private maternity wing, of course."

"Oh, of course," Elena says. "Naturally." She hisses in pain at another contraction, and Klaus climbs out of bed and makes his way over to his dresser. "Yes, take your time changing, it's not like I'm having a baby here or anything," she bites out. He laughs, finishes getting dressed, and opens the door to the bathroom to grab her favorite robe from where it's hanging on the door. She shifts and puts her feet on the ground, wincing a little, and shrugs on the robe, and then just as she's about to stand Klaus sweeps an arm under her legs and picks her up.

"Klaus!" She smacks his chest, lightly. "I can walk, you know."

"I don't doubt that you can, love, but why should you?" he asks.

She gives up, and he carries her to the car. The drive to the hospital is way too fast to be legal, and she doesn't have to wait at all before she's ushered into the private wing and Klaus is lying her down on a hospital bed that's much more comfortable than any hospital bed she's ever lain on before. She doesn't think twice before accepting an epidural.

The delivery suite is ridiculous; on top of the room she's in, which is enormous, there's a huge bathroom and a massive sitting room, and it turns out Klaus is having her delivery _catered_ , so there's a tiered tray of pastries next to her if she decides she wants to nibble on anything. It's completely ridiculous. There's an enormous TV, though, which is nice; Elena forces Klaus to sit through a good five episodes of _Gilmore Girls_.

"I think our Miranda is going to grow up to resemble Rory quite a bit," he says when they take a break to eat. "Though perhaps less trusting; I won't stand for her to associate with boys at all like that one Rory's with. If anyone dared to disrespect my daughter like that, I'd string–"

"Klaus!" she says, but laughs all the same. "When she's old enough to date, you can talk about how you'll react to the boys she brings home – or girls, or both –"

"You think she might be prefer the company of women?" Klaus asks, straightening up in his seat, with a smile. "Now, that sounds far more–"

"She hasn't even taken a breath yet!" Elena shakes her head. "She's not interested in anyone, she's not even born."

"I'm thinking ahead, sweetheart," Klaus says.

"Over a decade ahead?" Elena asks. "Don't you think that's a bit much?"

"Your mom definitely did," comes Jenna's voice from the doorway. "Your dad, not so much."

"Jenna!" Elena grins, wider than she has in ages. Jenna walks over to her and hugs her, Jeremy and John behind her. "What are you doing here?"

"I took the liberty of having your family flown in," Klaus says. "Mine should be joining us shortly."

"Wait, your _family_ is coming?" Elena asks.

Klaus smirks. "There was a time when the birth of an heir was an extravagant event," he tells her.

Elena considers retorting, but settles on just shaking her head.

Within the hour, the sitting room has turned into something of a cocktail reception; Klaus has bottles of expensive champagne in circulation, and while Kol doesn't make an appearance, both Elijah and Rebekah (who is very put out that no one came to her room to wake her when they left for the hospital) show up. Elijah doesn't come anywhere near Elena's room – he exchanges a few words with Klaus, tells him that he'll be in the city for the next couple of days, and then takes off. Rebekah doesn't leave Elena's room except to refill her glass or to grab another beignet. There's a TV in the sitting room, so John and Jeremy find some sort of sports game playing and stay there for the most part. Jenna doesn't leave her side.

When the time comes for her to push, everyone but Jenna and Klaus is shepherded out of the room. Klaus sits in the armchair as far from the bed as possible. Jenna is half-seated next to Elena, wrapping an arm around her, stroking her hair and forehead, telling her exactly how badly Elena's mother had cussed her father out when Jeremy had been born while Elena hiccups out laughs.

It's exhausting, and it hurts; but she's been a lot more tired and been through a lot more pain. She's had a lot worse.

Miranda Grace Gilbert is born as healthy as a baby can be, with clear blue eyes and not a single hair on her head.

She's the most beautiful thing Elena's ever seen.

Everyone else agrees on that point. Jenna coos at her, and Rebekah holds her like she's scared she'll break her; Jeremy sits on the bed and rocks her while Elena leans against his shoulder, and when she asks John if he wants to pick her up he looks as though he expects to wake up from a dream any moment. Rebekah calls Elijah and so Elijah comes by. He doesn't ask to hold Miranda, and Elena doesn't offer; he strokes one finger down the side of Miranda's cheek with more care than she thinks he'd touch an ancient painting with. He only stays a few minutes before excusing himself. He thanks her, before he leaves; it's the most sincere she's ever heard him sound.

Klaus stays on the other side of the room through all of this; he doesn't take his eyes off the baby for a moment.

At long last, it's just the two of them – the three of them. Elena looks at Miranda, and knows she'll never be tired of looking. This is her daughter, her daughter, _her daughter_ , the child she was never supposed to have, the girl who was never supposed to be born, except that her being born is the only good thing Elena's sure of anymore, the only good thing in this whole world, the only reason anything else has ever happened.

Katherine never got to hold her baby; Tatia was killed before she could see her child grow up. Elena looks at her daughter and thinks _I will not die_ ; never before has she wanted to live this much.

She glances up at Klaus, who's still standing against the wall on the other side of the room. "Do you want to hold her?" she asks.

Klaus frowns.

"Come over here," she says, and Klaus does, moving as though he isn't quite sure of his center of gravity any longer. "You haven't even met your daughter yet."

Klaus sits on the bed, and Elena places Miranda in his arms; there's a look on his face she's never seen before, and after a moment she realizes it's awe. She thinks back to that bright, sunny day when he'd pledged to be a better father to their daughter than Mikael was to him. She'd known he meant it; now, she actually believes it.

. . .

They go back to the house the next day, and she extends an invitation for her family to stay for a few days on the condition that they go out and explore San Francisco while they have the chance. When she gets home, she makes her way up to the nursery, nestles into the rocking chair with Miranda in her arms, and sits for hours and hours, holding her, feeding her, watching her sleep. Her daughter falls asleep in her arms like she knows she'll never have a safer place to land. Elena knows that she's a baby and this is what babies do, she knows this, but she lets herself believe that somewhere deep down Miranda already knows Elena will never let her fall. She sleeps like it, like she already knows, and Elena can't help but marvel this creature that trusts her more than Elena herself remembers ever trusting anyone.

Her daughter, her daughter, her _daughter_.

Elena hasn't thought of lullabies in forever. She didn't know she still remembered any, but she manages to find one in the depths of her memory, and she sings it, her voice only a little rusty. She didn't know she had anything that innocent left inside of her.

Maybe the girl inside her isn't quite dead, after all.

Klaus comes in that afternoon. "You ought to get some rest," he tells her, his voice quiet enough not to wake Miranda.

Elena ignores him, eyes fixed on the sleeping form in her arms. After a long moment, she looks up at him. "Do you think she'll be happy?" she asks.

Klaus blinks. "Happy?" he asks.

 _I want her to have the life neither of us got to live_ , Elena wants to say. _I want her to never go a moment in her life not knowing she's desperately loved. I want her to never see so much of the world that she thinks she's ready to leave it_. "I want her to be happy," she settles on saying, instead.

"So do I," Klaus says. He meets her eyes.

They've never looked at each other like this before, without hidden intent, without a shred of performance. She exhales, and she can feel something unwinding in her chest; when she inhales, she breathes so deeply she thinks she might cry.

"She has your eyes," Elena says at last.

Klaus smiles. "All infants are born with blue eyes," he tells her.

She shakes her head. "They're your eyes, Klaus," she tells him. "They aren't going to change."

"You sound very certain of that," he tells her.

"I am," she says, and looks back down at her daughter. "And I was right, by the way. She does have my nose."

It takes Klaus a moment, and then he bursts into laughter, delighted and surprised; she laughs too, after a moment.

She's a mother, and she's holding her child; she's sitting in her daughter's nursery with her father in the doorway. It's a moment she never expected to have.

She wishes she could live in it forever.

. . .

Jenna and Jeremy and John all arrive that night, and Jeremy comes straight up to the nursery before she's had the chance to go down and greet them – no, that's a lie, she heard them arriving, she could have gone down; she chose not to, to stay exactly where she is, sitting with her daughter in her arms.

"Can I hold her again?" he asks.

Of course he can: he's _Jeremy_. He holds Miranda like he was born for it, and Elena looks at him and thinks _please, please fall in love and get married and have children, please have a happy marriage and 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. Please, let Jeremy have that_.

"Miranda Grace," he says, after a long moment. "I think mom and dad would like that."

"That I had a baby with the biggest, baddest vampire of all time?" Elena asks, voice wry.

"That you love them this much, after everything," Jeremy replies, instead.

Had he said her parents would understand, she'd have laughed; she doesn't believe that, she'd given up on trying to believe that ages ago. She isn't the daughter they wanted her to be – but she loves them, and it's the best she can give them.

She looks at her daughter, and she can't breathe – it's like there's a brick in her chest, and she has to look away, eyes misting over, before she can inhale again.

The next day Alaric arrives, of all people. He shows up at the house out of the blue, and Elena's thrilled, of _course_ she's thrilled – she runs and hugs him, and he smells the same way he smelled when he came to pick her up after the sacrifice, like safety.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, beaming, after she pulls away.

Alaric doesn't answer – he looks over his shoulder to where Jenna is standing, and Elena looks back at Jenna, too. Jenna is grinning. "Yes," she says.

Elena narrows her eyes. "Wait, what's going on?" she asks.

Alaric opens his mouth as though to speak but then hesitates, and Jenna laughs and walks over to Elena, taking her hand.

"The night you went into labor," Jenna says, "Alaric and I were out together. We had dinner, and then we went for a drive, and drove and drove all the way to DC. We walked along the monuments, in the middle of the night, and then we were at the FDR monument and the fountains were all lit and running, and… Ric proposed."

"Oh my god," Elena says, face splitting into a smile so big it hurts. "Oh my god! Jenna!"

"And then she got the call," Alaric chimes in, laughing.

Elena blinks. "Wait, what?"

"One of Klaus's henchmen called me," Jenna says with a laugh, "and there's a special ringtone installed for that, so of course I had to answer it–"

"–Klaus installed a special ringtone on your phone?" Elena asks. She's going to be annoyed about this later, but right now she can't find it in herself to be.

"–and as soon as she heard you'd gone into labor, she told me that she would say yes, but for now, we were putting a pin in it," Alaric finishes.

"What?" Elena asks, looking between them.

Jenna's smile makes Elena want to cry. "It was the day your daughter was going to be born," she says. "I wasn't going to steal your thunder by getting engaged the same day."

Elena laughs, touched and delighted and too overwhelmed about everything in her life by half, and Jenna wraps an arm around her and presses a kiss to her temple.

"So when you just said yes–" Elena asks.

Jenna grins, and looks over at Alaric, who reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small black box. He opens it to reveal a beautiful ring – two gold bands with a princess cut diamond, so stunning and so perfectly _Jenna_ – and Elena takes a step back, almost in tears (stupid post-natal hormones) and watches as he slides it onto Jenna's finger.

Later, Elena knows, she'll be feeling almost sad, thinking back on this – she'll never have this, not this earnest love, not this romance without any layers of performance between them – but she doesn't feel that now, not in the least. She's just happy, now – happier than it's probably safe to be, and so full of love she thinks she'll burst with it.

Alaric stays with them for a few more days – after a week, though, all four of their visitors head back to Mystic Falls, and as much as Elena loves them and will miss them she's also more relieved than she'd ever admit. She has a daughter, and above and beyond everyone else she cares about, she wants to be alone with her daughter, and the only person she really wants with her is the only other person as in awe of Miranda's existence as she is.

. . .

The doctor told them that, to be safe, they should wait up to six weeks before having sex – Elena interpreted this as a flexible guideline, but Klaus, of course, took it as seriously as possible. He wants her to have more children, she knows, and he won't take any risks in that department, but after a while it becomes tedious, waiting that long; she wants him, and she knows he wants her, and knowing this but not being able to act on it actually _aches_.

Which is why, the morning of the day she's been cleared for sex, she crawls out of bed early, as quiet as she can, and tiptoes to the bathroom, draws herself a bath, strips naked, climbs in, and waits for him.

It's less than an hour before she hears him say "Elena?", voice bemused, to which she replies "in here." He walks in, shirtless, because he always sleeps shirtless, sees her, and raises an eyebrow.

"Care to join me?" she asks, grinning.

He laughs. "Quite the production you've put together here, love," he says.

She raises an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you've forgotten what day it is," she says.

He laughs again. "Never," he says, and then pulls off his bottoms and climbs into the bath, She laughs, wrapping her legs around his torso as he leans in for a hungry kiss, and then shifts, leaning forward so he's sitting and she's on top of him, straddling him. Her hair is up in a bun, and he reaches up and pulls out the elastic so it tumbles all around her face and shoulders and down her back, its tips submerged in water, and then he grabs her waist and pulls her closer to him.

They're both desperate and desperately trying not to rush this; her hips are rolling over his, she's pulling his hair so hard he'd be in pain if he were human – he moves forward and she's beneath him, her face submerged just for a moment, and then she rises up to kiss him right above the surface of the water, desperate, mouth open against his, craving something she can never put into words, wanting, _needing_ , and taking.

After they've both finished, her legs are still wrapped around him, and a few minutes later she feels wind whipping around her face and then they're on the balcony, cool air all around them, but she's burning nevertheless, every inch of her body she can manage intertwined with him, his hands between her ass and the balcony railing so even though she's technically sitting she doesn't feel it at all. Anyone could see them – there's no one for miles, she knows this, he knows this, but the world is so wide around them, it seems to go on forever, and there's nothing in all of it except for the two of them.

After a few minutes, he pulls back. "Do you trust me?" he asks, grinning.

She laughs. "Do I have a choice?" she replies.

He jumps over the railing, holding her tight, and they land gently as can be in the sand, right where the rolling waves of the sea are breaking against land. He lays her down, and there's sand everywhere, but somehow she doesn't mind; the water rolls over them like a blessing, like a baptism, like a rebirth of sorts.

She shouldn't feel right, where she is, but she does; underneath her killer and her lover, right where the earth meets the sea, at the intersection of everything that doesn't make sense but that always will. She's underwater one moment and breathing like she's just learning how to the next, and his weight on top of her is soothing and certain and sure, anchoring her between dry land and the deep, exactly where she's meant to be.

 **THREE YEARS LATER**

Elena knows she's asleep. She's pretty sure you aren't supposed to know, when you're asleep – that should mean she's awake, except she's not awake, she's just as sure of this. Everything is black, but it's not because her eyes are closed; something is pulling at her, hard, and she reaches back as best as she can. It's like throwing a hand out to someone thrashing in the middle of strong currents – she could end up pulled in, instead, but she isn't.

Instead, she sees her own face looking back at her.

"Elena," says – Tatia, definitely Tatia, she doesn't even have to wait for the rest of Tatia to come into focus to tell it's her because she _knows,_ she knows like she knows her own name – maybe better. "Elena, thank the gods. I wasn't sure I'd be able to reach you – we haven't much time."

Elena can't reply. She knows this without even trying to say a word, and so she does not try.

"She's waking up, Elena," Tatia says; there's a fear in her eyes that Elena's never seen. "She's – do you remember what I told you, the last time? It's your daughter, Elena. I shouldn't be able to speak to you, to reach across worlds like this, but it's your daughter, _our_ daughter, and so just this once the laws of the worlds would bend for us.

A strange tune starts to play – a sort of humming, almost – in the very back of Elena's mind; Tatia's eyes grow wider. "You must prepare, Elena," she says, her voice quiet, words rushed. "You know as well as I do that this is not a simple dream. I cannot–" She closes her eyes. "Remember this, Elena," she says, after a moment. "Remember this. All of us depend on it."

Everything is black once more, but the tune doesn't fade – if anything it's clearer, less like humming, so precise and sharp it sounds almost like a music box. Images come, then, but nothing certain, everything shaking like it's being put under strobe lights, like it's being played through an old projector that's about to self-destruct. She sees Miranda lying in her bed, curled up under the pink covers they'd bought for her just a few weeks ago, holding her stuffed wolf against her chest like a lifeline; she hears the tune, louder and louder, sees Miranda toss and turn in her sleep; she sees plants, vines, rising up to the window, twining their way around Miranda's bedposts until they've wrapped their way all around her bed.

Elena wakes with a start, gasping so deeply the rush of air scraping against the back of her throat hurts; her heart is pounding so fast and so hard she feels sick to her stomach. She can't calm her breathing as hard as she tries – she's gasping, so violently it almost sounds like she's sobbing.

She can feel Klaus's form rousing next to her. "Elena, sweetheart?" he asks, voice drowsy. "Is something the matter?"

She can't slow her breathing, so she forces herself to hold her breath; the baby's only just started sleeping through the night, and if she doesn't stop she might wake him. "I'm fine," she says, her voice little more than a wheeze. "I'm fine, I just, I had a bad dream."

"What sort of dream?" Klaus asks.

She looks into his eyes and knows that she cannot tell him; she hasn't told him about Tatia, not in all these years. He can't know. He won't know.

"Miranda was in danger," Elena says, instead. "Someone was coming for her – someone magic, a witch, I think–"

Klaus sighs, and presses a kiss against her hair. "The children are perfectly fine, love," he says. "I promise. You haven't anything to worry about."

 _Remember this, Elena_ , Tatia had said.

Elena will remember. She promises this to Tatia in her mind, and hopes Tatia can hear: _I remember_.

"Yeah, you're right," she says, and swallows. "Just… a really bad nightmare, you know."

"Just breathe, sweetheart," Klaus says, and Elena curls into him and tries to match the rise and fall of her chest to his.

It takes a while, but finally, she falls back to sleep.

 **THE END**

 **. . .**

 **A/N: There will be a sequel. Thank you all so much for reading.**


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